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AI Biotech Hardware

Samsung Engineers Propose 'Copying and Pasting' the Brain onto AI Chips (engadget.com) 134

Posted by EditorDavid from the brain-dumps dept.
Samsung has proposed a way to build brain-like computer chips by "copying and pasting" a brain's neuron wiring map onto 3D neuromorphic chips. Engadget reports: The approach would rely on a nanoelectrode array that enters a large volumes of neurons to record both where the neurons connect and the strength of those connections. You could copy that data and 'paste' it to a 3D network of solid-state memory, whether it's off-the-shelf flash storage or cutting-edge memory like resistive RAM. Each memory unit would have a conductance that reflects the strength of each neuron connection in the map. The result would be an effective return to "reverse engineering the brain" like scientists originally wanted, Samsung said.

The move could serve as a 'shortcut' to artificial intelligence systems that behave like real brains, including the flexibility to learn new concepts and adapt to changing conditions. You might even see fully autonomous machines with true cognition, according to the researchers.
"Envisioned by the leading engineers and scholars from Samsung and Harvard University, the insight was published as a Perspective paper, titled 'Neuromorphic electronics based on copying and pasting the brain'..." Samsung said in a statement.

In short, they're proposing a method that "directly downloads the brain's neuronal connection map onto the memory chip."
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Samsung Engineers Propose 'Copying and Pasting' the Brain onto AI Chips More

Samsung Engineers Propose 'Copying and Pasting' the Brain onto AI Chips

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  • I call bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 26, 2021 @04:47PM (#61835019)

    Not even going to finish reading the summary. Complete bullshit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      Done it one.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        That was supposed to read "Done in one" but came out as indecipherable nonsense. I still think it's on-topic as the article is about complete nonsense.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          That was supposed to read "Done in one" but came out as indecipherable nonsense. I still think it's on-topic as the article is about complete nonsense.

          Can't argue with that.

          • IF you get through the summary, you'll find that its' quite nonsense. The human brain is not just a bunch of neurons with varying conductivity levels. There are hormones, states that change its behavior, biological and physiological conditions that also change the way it behaves, such as sleep requirements to detoxify it, etc... Just copying the steady-state instance of a brain might give you some interesting examples of how a thought propagates, but nothing more.
            • Going back to the original abstract, the goals aren't really to copy and paste a whole brain, just map and understand the local connectome of a set of neurons well enough to be able to replicate their actions and functions. Whether their aim to " ‘copy’ the functional synaptic connectivity map of a mammalian neuronal network using advanced neuroscience tools and then ‘paste’ this map onto a high-density three-dimensional network of solid-state memories." is a route to better computi

              • Has been known for some time. about 100 neurons that always connect in the same way. Tiny worm that still has quite a few behaviors.

                Yet we still do not know how it really works. There is so much other stuff going on, and interactions with the world outside. So looking at insects let alone humans looks rather silly.

                I doubt very much that general AI will come from directly modeling neurons. They will inspire technologies, but we work with silicone, not meat, which has different properties. And meatware

              • Yeh, except that we donâ(TM)t even know how the âoewiresâ connecting the neurons behave. Is the indication of a high value on a synapse based on the amplitude of the signal? Is it based on the frequency of the signalling? Is it based on the timing of the signal? Some combination of the above? Is the output a numeric value? A probability distribution? A mathematical function? Something entirely unrelated?

                If we donâ(TM)t even know what a wire is meant to do, how can we hope to wire

                • Yeh, except that we donâ(TM)t even know how the âoewiresâ connecting the neurons behave. Is the indication of a high value on a synapse based on the amplitude of the signal? Is it based on the frequency of the signalling? Is it based on the timing of the signal? Some combination of the above? Is the output a numeric value? A probability distribution? A mathematical function? Something entirely unrelated?

                  If we donâ(TM)t even know what a wire is meant to do, how can we hope to wire these things together?

                  A lot more of that is known than you realize. Yes, it is combination of the frequency, amplitude, and timing of the signal. The output is not a numeric value, or a mathematical function (lol).

                  • A lot more of that is known than you realize.

                    And a lot less than you assume.

                    Yes, it is combination of the frequency, amplitude, and timing of the signal.

                    That is a meaningless statement. Now, explain how all those work together.

                    • It's not a meaningless statement. That's just... not even defensible. It didn't explain what you hoped, ok, that would be on you to ask questions.

                      You didn't ask shit, you didn't show anything but ignorance, so there is no way that it would be useful to try to "explain" anything to you.

                      You're waving your hands and saying you don't know, which is knowable by you, and also that nobody else knows, which would require a lot more research. You'd have to show some knowledge before you can make a claim that is reas

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Jerry ( 6400 )
              Thank you. You saved me the time of writing a response that would have been essentially identical to yours. Maybe if programmers working in AI were required to minor in biochemistry and anatomy & physiology this kind of nonsense would fade away.

            • Over time, certainly.

              But over short-term periods neurons behave in a fairly predictable manner. A lot more complicated than the "transistors" of a neural net AI, more like a simple microprocessor, but my understanding is that we're getting pretty good at making accurate simulations of individual neuron behavior through time. I think I recall hearing about a neurology team a few years back that were successfully simulating the behavior of small brain structures.

              And if you have both an accurate enough simul

              • Sure, you get a map of the brain in one state and . . . hook it up to what? Video inputs aren't the same as eyes. MP3 or audio over I2C aren't ears. How do you even mimic the simple sensation of sitting in a chair? Sure, pressure on some nerves, thermal nerves sensing the change in temp from floor to head level, pressure nerves feeling the weight of shoes and other clothes. But don't forget that hair follicles have nerves reporting how each hair has been moved; shirts arent uniform so some nerves will disa

                • >hook it up to what?
                  A simulated body - that's probably far, far easier than trying to simulate the brain in the first place. At least at low sensory resolution.

                  We already create prosthetics to electronically stimulate nerves to provide vision and hearing, even touch for cutting-edge artificial hands. Generally the most difficult part is preventing nerve scarring at the cybernetic interface, a non-issue for a simulated brain. You don't even have to wire things up correctly, the brain is astoundingly fle

              • But over short-term periods neurons behave in a fairly predictable manner.

                Yeah, like a single neuron for a few microseconds.
                Beyond that, just pure speculation.

                • Well sure - the bigger point is that hardware is approaching the point where we could give the speculation a shot, and start having a more informed conversation. We have no idea just how resilient brains are to the (mis)behavior of individual neurons.

                  And there might be a lot of potential even if we're not really talking about simulating particular people or animals. If you're looking at trying to train a neural-spike network AI to handle real-world scenarios you need to provide some sort of initial conditi

            • IF you get through the summary, you'll find that

              "the leading engineers and scholars from Samsung and Harvard University"

              Except they're not leading anything in brain research, their Harvard professor is chemist who specializes in materials.

              Engineers and materials chemists have simplistic view of biology, news at 11

    • Sounds like they just finished watching Westworld. Season one is fantastic.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Sounds like they just finished watching Westworld. Season one is fantastic.

        It is. But stay away from the later ones. Complete crap.

        • It is. But stay away from the later ones. Complete crap.

          Season Two is still excellent, and had one of the very best of all of the shows ("Kiksuya"). But season three tanked pretty bad.

          • Season two was nonsense. Dolores's personality was ruined and the entire plot was filled with plot holes.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Season two was nonsense. Dolores's personality was ruined and the entire plot was filled with plot holes.

              Indeed. It was like they replaced the whole writer-team or gave them LSD. Complete crap from season 2 onward.

        • I just don't get this, and I feel like its often a not very genuine opinion put forward by people who are just genuflecting to some hive mind opinion in Westworld forums. Reddit's /r/westworld is famous for this.

          I'm not accusing you of this specifically, just that once the opinion leaders weighed in, the social media effect kicks in where people regurgitate the opinion for votes/points and ultimately a sense of status.

          What's funny is there are other shows with demonstrably *worse* later seasons than Westwo

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            I just don't get this, and I feel like its often a not very genuine opinion put forward by people who are just genuflecting to some hive mind opinion in Westworld forums. Reddit's /r/westworld is famous for this.

            I watched these and I found season 2 to be pretty bad _without_ ever before discussing this with anybody. Season 3 I just looked at some samples and saw no improvement. I never saw "Colony". Sure, had I just seen Season 2 & 3 of WW, I may have found them barely tolerable, but given Season 1, they were not.

            You cannot deduce from some social-media hypes that they are actually wrong. Some people may have arrived independently at the same conclusion. Remember that even total morons like Trump and his fans a

            • Most of the postings about S2 and 3 of WW are super low effort though. Its just a regurgitation of preferences, not some kind of "why" it wasn't good.

    • "Not even going to finish reading the summary. Complete bullshit."

      Not at all, they'll slice and dice your brain and make a non-working copy.
      What's not to like?

    • Yeh, thereâ(TM)s extremely active research going into even the most simple things in the brain, like how activation of one synapse effects the outputs of a single neuron. Itâ(TM)s impossible to âoedownloadâ a brain if we donâ(TM)t even know how the simplest cells in the brain behave on an individual level.

    • Connecting neurons is one thing, having them fire in the right way to mimic the brain (see spike trains) is another.
    • I call bullshit on your bullshit calling.

      I see no reason why something like this wouldn't work...eventually. Maybe this first iteration would be imperfect but I see no reason why it wouldn't work. Our brain is basically a biological neural network computer.

      • eventually

        You mean like after we finally get a grip on how the brain works?

        Our brain is basically a biological neural network computer.

        Please explain how those work.

  • And similar to Dr. Frankenstein's quality control problem, an idiot's brain will be used and duplicated. We're going from "computers, making mistakes faster" to "AI Brains, making stupid faster and mass produced."

    • That would be Abyâ¦.. Aby Normal

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      The Scene: Samsung engineers are all a'twitter over the Great Turning On of their new silicon brain:

      Eng. #1: I shall now press the Big Red Button.

      Eng. #2: I think I'm going to orgasm.

      Eng. #1: (press) So, Mr. Bot, how are you?

      Ms Bot: I'm a woman you twit, why are you bothering me?

      Eng. #2: We built you so we could. . .errrr. . .Eng. #1 why did we build her?

      Eng. #1: Uh. . .I wrote it down. . .here. . .somewhere. . .I know I did. . .

      Ms. Bot: Oh well that's just peachy, you build me and now have to look for dire

  • Propose Copy and Pasting the old climate over top of the new climate. This Copy and Paste thing seems to be the new engineering.

    Caution: Sad times ahead until someone outlaws copy and paste.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      In coding, copy & paste is for those with no understanding at all. Seems to apply here as well.

  • Something really small like Trumps Brain. Only problem is you would not know if it was working or had crashed and was just spewing BS. :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      Somebody already made the Young Frankenstein "abby normal" brain joke. Nice try, though.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by maybe111 ( 4811467 )

      make sure that it's not something too deteriorated, like Biden's brain...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suss ( 158993 )

      Bad post for a bad topic. It fits.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      It takes quite a lot of intellect to be able to con yourself into turning into the potus while not being a bush or a clinton.
      Now it's a bit of a shame when the intellect starts and end with "how to get to power"

      • It takes quite a lot of intellect to be able to con yourself into turning into the potus while not being a bush or a clinton.

        I find this claim bizarre.
        97.88% of all Presidents have not been a Clinton.
        95.66% of all Presidents have not been a Bush.
        93.48% of all Presidents have been neither a Clinton or a Bush.
        Bushes are 3 in 5 for successfully becoming President.
        Clintons are 2 in 3.
        Bushes only managed to tie other "dynasties" in US Presidential history, and both have failed to perpetuate them (Hillary, Jeb)

  • Down that road you'll get a machine that costs 100 million dollars, consume electricity enough to light a small city, and is about as intelligent as my cousin Larry. Way to go.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by xlsior ( 524145 )

      Down that road you'll get a machine that costs 100 million dollars, consume electricity enough to light a small city, and is about as intelligent as my cousin Larry. Way to go.

      Of course.

      The first electronic computers were also absolutely ridiculous in cost, power, size, speed, and overall capabilities compared to modern PC's. But you have to start somewhere and go from there. If nothing else we're also learning what doesn't work.

    • "I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them."

      • I'm betting that in a couple of years, we'll all have dinner plate sized processors, with all the innards (RAM, SSD and CPU) on one wafer.

  • This is how Skynet is born and how she will give birth to the demise of man.

    Just sayin' - here is the quote from Animatrix:
    "In the beginning, there was man. And for a time, it was good. But humanity’s so-called civil societies soon fell victim to vanity and corruption. Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the architect of his own demise."

  • And still the neural-network just calculates floating point numbers. Nothing else.... Alone it solves nothing.

  • "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they *should*."

    • Except in this case the would and could are the reverse of that. We don't understand enough about the brain to copy it accurately, or frankly even to do a good job of doing it inaccurately.

    • Scientists spend tons of time thinking about whether they *should*. Specifically, there is an entire career called an "AI Ethicist" where people are trained to think about these particular problems.

      And the answer is absolutely they should.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      This doesn't sound like the scientists. The scientists would know that neuromorphic chips use very crude emulations of a neuron, and can't be expected to do the same job. This sounds like the PR department reporting on some engineers speculation...or possibly the way the engineer explained what he was doing to them, because he knew he couldn't be very accurate.

  • Oh wait heâ(TM)s still alive to watch his prediction come true

  • they saved hitler's brain 2030?

  • It even has been proposed for medical purposes so you can tests treatments beforehand.

  • Suppose they do. That would be the hardware (Score:5, Insightful)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Sunday September 26, 2021 @05:39PM (#61835221)

    But what about the software? Even if you copy the brain's anatomy, you still don't know how it thinks and reasons. That's a much harder problem.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      That's just the beginning of the problem. The actual problem is that brain is only a part of the human reasoning system. A lot of inputs come from other parts of the body. Signalling between the brain, the gut and the sex organs just to name a few form very significant portion of reasoning.

      That before the fact that brain is not a static system of "this map of neurons". It's ever changing to adapt to new demands put on it by everything from environment to mental condition of the moment.

  • ... meets neuroscience.

  • Is the copy process destructive?
    If so, you want to make sure "Paste" works before you do "Copy" live, or is that dead?

    Next question, which assumes success, which is by no means guaranteed. Assuming the "paste"d AI wants to retain its human rights, and assuming those rights are granted, which is by no means assured, what happens if you "paste" twice?

    If the copy does not get rights, does it get any protections from being considered and treated like a slave? (ie, any other machine or computer) If there is a

    • Don't get carried away with fantasy. They are simply talking about trying to literally copy a biological neural network to see if they can replicate its behavior because no one has been able to do that with even the simplest biological neural system under study yet. They are talking about trying to mimic something like the tiny marine worm Caenorhabditis elegans which has 302 neurons. We already know how all of them are connected, but we cannot emulate the worm's behavior.

      But the real problem with this sche

      • But the real problem with this scheme is it is also a fantasy in that it does not seem to appreciate the complexity of biological neurons which are not much like artificial neurons at all. Sure, they have connections, and the strength of the connection somehow is used for computation, but we cannot actually judge what that connection strength is, and our algorithms from new strengths from old ones are nothing like what biology does.

        There is a long history of trying to map neurons on to electronic components. Maybe they are the equivalent of transistors? No, more like logic gates. No, more like a simple processor. No more like... at this point they seem to have the complexity of a (artificial) neural network themselves, though much slower.

        There is no "downloading" consciousness involved with this scheme, it it is even feasible.

        Yup, there is a lot of recent work that suggests neurons are far more computationally powerfully than we previously thought, so not like hardware gates at all.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dpilot ( 134227 )

        But it's more fun to run with the silly part of it.

        It also lets you explore an idea broached on STNG. If we succeeded in building a conscious A.I. would we be obliged to "free" it or else become slaveholders?

  • Blindly copying nature (Score:4, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday September 26, 2021 @06:11PM (#61835309)

    Nature isnâ(TM)t necessarily the best at anything. A car can travel faster than a cheetah. Heck, the fastest human on a bicycle is 3 times faster than a cheetah. Airplanes are faster than birds. Imitating nature while useful for some things, is not necessarily the optimal solution to a problem. Nature has the problem of having to have been evolved incrementally to solve environmental problems. The human brain only had to be good enough to beat whatever challenges it needed to in order to produce the next generation. Furthermore, DNA can only encode problems solvable by enzymes that can be produced by rna and the ribosome. Synthetics on the other hand donâ(TM)t need the solution to be in RNA/protein space.

    • We could not make airplanes faster (or larger) than birds until the science of aerodynamics was pretty well understood. We have no science of intelligence yet. We are still struggling to understand what we even mean when we use the term. No, we are not going to beat nature are intelligence for a very long time. In the meantime showing that you can at least do a better job of copying it than we can in emulating it would be a step forward. We need to understand how intelligence works first.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tragedy ( 27079 )

      Heck, the fastest human on a bicycle is 3 times faster than a cheetah

      I feel I need to respond to that. The bicycle speed records you're looking at are either downhill records or "paced" records. The latter is when the bicycle is riding in the slipstream of a motorcycle. It's very difficult and strenuous (and dangerous) to do, but it's still basically like being towed. The "real" unassisted bicycle speed record looks like about 82 mph, which is only a little over the estimated top speed for a cheetah (although some of those may overestimate real world cheetah speed a bit). Wh

  • It's been done (Score:3)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday September 26, 2021 @06:21PM (#61835351) Journal

    The problem with this idea is getting the 3D map of the neuron connections. It has been done for very small micro-organisms, but it took a long time, many years.
    The second problem is that once you have the map, you still have no idea what any part of it does. Even for very simple brain maps, this is not easy.

  • Samsung has proposed a way to build brain-like computer chips

    ... because this is, how computers gain rights...

  • Bugs (Score:2)

    by dohzer ( 867770 )

    Will they fix all the bugs before or after fabrication?

  • There's no way I'm going to get stuck in a Samsung ecosystem.

  • It's EXACTLY like that episode with the thing, that does the thing, and then there's that GUY! And nothing is really what it seems, and after that, there's the surprise ending!!!!

  • Work in progress: http://openworm.org/ [openworm.org]

    How is Samsung creative there? This idea is 100s years old.
    They may have hw ready by 22nd century?

  • Copy and paste sounds like the hard way. With cut and paste you'd at least know you have a working brain.
  • This "brain" would only be a moment in time, not really capable of learning since it woudl have no way to grow new pathways. It's a nice science project. That's all it is.
  • In 1950 Soviet scientists proposed a way to use a tokamak to generate electricity from nuclear fusion. Proposing the action is the first step, but it doesn't mean you'll live long enough to see success.

  • Star Trek TOS: The Ultimate Computer

    Gee, that episode sure turned out well!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msk ( 6205 )

      I would have worded it: Because that worked so well for Richard Daystrom.

  • It's not a new idea, it's only fairly recently that we'd have the ability to even map out the complexity of a mouse brain.
    Of course the entire thing will be slowed down by having to simulate connection speeds between neurons, when some simulated neurons are on the same chip, and others are on chip. (I'm going with the idea memory chips rather than something like a hard drive).
    Of course, organic brains, even something as simple as a mouses brain, is operating in parallel that exceeds any computer the researc

  • This will beat Apple's Silicon (Score:3)

    by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @09:49AM (#61837233)

    We all remember that M1 thru M4 were "less than successful".

    M5 is committed.

    (And Daystrom will be, too!)

  • A biological brains' neural connectivity is dynamic, not static, and it's closer to an analog computer than it is to a digital computer.
  • I think I've seen this episode...

  • Don't they have to dissect it in ultra-thin layers, then scan each layer?

    We don't have the ability to put that brain back together, y'know.

  • Actually we already dissect brains into ultra-thin layers and scan their images, it's the biochemical reactions part that's tricky, and electronic circuitry doesn't do that very well (as in not at all).

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