6 ms·

1.4 PB/mm^3 (petabytes per millimeter cubed)×1260 cm^3 (cubic centimeters, large human brain) = 1.76×10^21 bytes = 1.76 ZB (zetabytes)

by posnet 2y ago

bahrant 2y ago
wow
gary17the 2y ago
[AI] "Frontier [supercomputer]: the storage capacity is reported to be up to 700 petabytes (PB)" (0.0007 ZB). [AI] "The installed base of global data storage capacity [is] expected to increase to around 16 zettabytes in 2025". Thus, even the largest supercomputer on Earth cannot store more than 4 percent of state of a single human brain. Even all the servers on the entire Internet could store state of only 9 human brains. Astonishing.
- ibeforee 2y ago
  We don’t know to even model that state: do we need the position and velocity and charge of every atom, or can a neuron be approximated by a bfloat?
- dekhn 2y ago
  One point about storage- it's economically driven. If there was a demand signal (say, the government dedicated a few hundred billion dollars to a single storage systems), hard drive manufacturers could deploy much more storage in a year. I've pointed this out to a number of scientists, but none of them could really think of a way to get the government to spend that much money just to store data without it curing a senator's heart disease.
  - falcor84 2y ago
    > without it curing a senator's heart disease Obviously I'm not advocating for this, but I'll just link to the Mad TV skit about how the drunk president cured cancer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va71a7pLvy8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va71a7pLvy8
- falcor84 2y ago
  I appreciate you're running the numbers to extrapolate this approach, but just wanted to note that this particular figure isn't an upper bound nor a longer bound for actually storing the "state of a single human brain". Assuming the intent would be to store the amount of information needed to essentially "upload" the mind onto a computer emulation, we might not yet have all the details we need in this kind of scanning, but once we do, we may likely discover that a huge portion of it is redundant. In any case, it seems likely that we're on track to have both the computational ability and the actual neurological data needed to create an "uploaded intelligences" sometime over the next decade. Lena [0] tells of the first successfully uploaded scan taking place in 2031, and I'm concerned that reality won't be far off. [0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
  - rmorey 2y ago
    we are nowhere near whole human brain volume EM. the next major milestone in the field is a whole mouse brain in the next 5-10 years, which is possible but ambitious
    - falcor84 2y ago
      What am I missing? Assuming exponential growth in capability, that actually sounds very on track. If we can get from 1 cubic millimeter to a whole mouse brain in 5-10 years, why should it take more than a few extra years to scale that to a human brain?
      - rmorey 2y ago
        assuming exponential growth in capacity is a big assumption!
  - gary17the 2y ago
    > we may likely discover that a huge portion of [a human brain] is redundant Unless one's understanding of algorithmic inner workings of a particular black box system is actually very good, it is likely not possible not only to discard any of its state, but even implement any kind of meaningful error detection if you do discard. Given the sheer size and complexity of a human brain, I feel it is actually very unlikely that we will be able to understand its inner workings to such a significant degree anytime soon. I'm not optimistic, because so far we have no idea how even laughingly simple, in comparison, AI models work[0]. [0] "God Help Us, Let's Try To Understand AI Monosemanticity", https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-und...
- treprinum 2y ago
  AI folks dream about creating superintelligence to guide our lives but all we can do is drosophilla's brain.
- shpx 2y ago
  If you can preserve and scan the tissue in a way that lets you scan the same area multiple times you wouldn't need to digitize the whole thing. Put the slices on rotating platters with a microscope for each platter and read parts of the brain on demand. It's a hard drive but instead of magnets storing the bits of an image of the sample, it's the actual physical sample.
  - gary17the 2y ago
    Not if you want to actually execute the state of a human brain in a digital simulation to see how it works and whether it still displays certain abilities such as comprehension and consciousness. Otherwise a digital scan of a brain is just a glorified microscope.
userbinator 2y ago
It's very lossy and unreliable storage, however. To use an analogy, it's only a huge amount of ECC that keeps things (just barely) working.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

1.4 PB/mm^3 (petabytes per millimeter cubed)×1260 cm^3 (cubic centimeters, large human brain) = 1.76×10^21 bytes = 1.76 ZB (zetabytes)

by posnet 2y ago

1.4 PB/mm^3 (petabytes per millimeter cubed)×1260 cm^3 (cubic centimeters, large human brain) = 1.76×10^21 bytes = 1.76 ZB (zetabytes)

bahrant 2y ago

wow

gary17the 2y ago

[AI] "Frontier [supercomputer]: the storage capacity is reported to be up to 700 petabytes (PB)" (0.0007 ZB). [AI] "The installed base of global data storage capacity [is] expected to increase to around 16 zettabytes in 2025". Thus, even the largest supercomputer on Earth cannot store more than 4 percent of state of a single human brain. Even all the servers on the entire Internet could store state of only 9 human brains. Astonishing.

ibeforee 2y ago
We don’t know to even model that state: do we need the position and velocity and charge of every atom, or can a neuron be approximated by a bfloat?
dekhn 2y ago
One point about storage- it's economically driven. If there was a demand signal (say, the government dedicated a few hundred billion dollars to a single storage systems), hard drive manufacturers could deploy much more storage in a year. I've pointed this out to a number of scientists, but none of them could really think of a way to get the government to spend that much money just to store data without it curing a senator's heart disease.
- falcor84 2y ago
  > without it curing a senator's heart disease Obviously I'm not advocating for this, but I'll just link to the Mad TV skit about how the drunk president cured cancer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va71a7pLvy8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va71a7pLvy8
falcor84 2y ago
I appreciate you're running the numbers to extrapolate this approach, but just wanted to note that this particular figure isn't an upper bound nor a longer bound for actually storing the "state of a single human brain". Assuming the intent would be to store the amount of information needed to essentially "upload" the mind onto a computer emulation, we might not yet have all the details we need in this kind of scanning, but once we do, we may likely discover that a huge portion of it is redundant. In any case, it seems likely that we're on track to have both the computational ability and the actual neurological data needed to create an "uploaded intelligences" sometime over the next decade. Lena [0] tells of the first successfully uploaded scan taking place in 2031, and I'm concerned that reality won't be far off. [0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- rmorey 2y ago
  we are nowhere near whole human brain volume EM. the next major milestone in the field is a whole mouse brain in the next 5-10 years, which is possible but ambitious
  - falcor84 2y ago
    What am I missing? Assuming exponential growth in capability, that actually sounds very on track. If we can get from 1 cubic millimeter to a whole mouse brain in 5-10 years, why should it take more than a few extra years to scale that to a human brain?
    - rmorey 2y ago
      assuming exponential growth in capacity is a big assumption!
- gary17the 2y ago
  > we may likely discover that a huge portion of [a human brain] is redundant Unless one's understanding of algorithmic inner workings of a particular black box system is actually very good, it is likely not possible not only to discard any of its state, but even implement any kind of meaningful error detection if you do discard. Given the sheer size and complexity of a human brain, I feel it is actually very unlikely that we will be able to understand its inner workings to such a significant degree anytime soon. I'm not optimistic, because so far we have no idea how even laughingly simple, in comparison, AI models work[0]. [0] "God Help Us, Let's Try To Understand AI Monosemanticity", https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-und...
treprinum 2y ago
AI folks dream about creating superintelligence to guide our lives but all we can do is drosophilla's brain.
shpx 2y ago
If you can preserve and scan the tissue in a way that lets you scan the same area multiple times you wouldn't need to digitize the whole thing. Put the slices on rotating platters with a microscope for each platter and read parts of the brain on demand. It's a hard drive but instead of magnets storing the bits of an image of the sample, it's the actual physical sample.
- gary17the 2y ago
  Not if you want to actually execute the state of a human brain in a digital simulation to see how it works and whether it still displays certain abilities such as comprehension and consciousness. Otherwise a digital scan of a brain is just a glorified microscope.

userbinator 2y ago

It's very lossy and unreliable storage, however. To use an analogy, it's only a huge amount of ECC that keeps things (just barely) working.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]