Asklemmy

43760 readers

1161 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Could real neurons be used for LLMs? (lemm.ee)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There's a video on YouTube where someone has managed to train a network of rat neurons to play doom, the way they did it seems reminiscent of how we train ML models

I am under the impression from the video that real neurons are a lot better at learning than simulated ones (and much less power demanding)

Could any ML problems, such as natural language generation be solved using neurons instead and would that be in any way practical?

Ethically at this point is this neuron array considered conscious in any way?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Honestly I've wondered this about shining a laser through some kind of laser-etched glass. Only problem is, I have no idea how to represent something like an activation function using only reflection and such.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Think you might've commented on the wrong post

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Haha naw, it's the same basic idea, just using something inorganic (like glass) to represent a neural network instead of something like biological neurons.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Cool idea, though existing computers are also an inorganic way to representing a neural net

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago

Well, yes, but something like an etched glass would be better in basically every way, if it could be done. (See my other comment in this thread if you want more details)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What on earth are you talking about?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

A neural network is an array of layered nodes, where each node contains some kind of activation function, and each connection represents some weight multiplier. Importantly, once the model is trained, it's stateless, meaning we don't need to store any extra data to use it - just inputs and outputs.

If we could take some sort of material, like a glass, and modify it so that if you shone a light through one end, the light would bounce in such a way as to emulate these functions and weights, you could create an extremely cheap, compact, fast, and power efficient neural network. In theory, at least.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So just ML on an optical computer, or some sort of baseless sci-fi thing you made up?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

A mix of both, but keep in mind that I'm commenting on a post about a related made up sci-fi idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

It most certainly is not: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/11/1084926/human-brain-cells-chip-organoid-speech-recognition/

Neural organoids have been a thing for a few years now.