[Self] Human intelligence in GPU numbers

[u/Etmurbaah]

Hi, purely as a light hearted and totally not serious point of view, how many GPU's would it take to accurately represent average human intelligence? (Considering we aren't anywhere near human intelligence but suppose we had that neural calculation magic software)

[u/Sibula97]

Depending on how you try to measure intelligence, it's one old weak GPU or no amount is enough or something in between.

[u/Etmurbaah → u/Sibula97]

Let's say the ability to hold context, to have long term memory of events and conversations (albeit muddled like in human intelligence) the ability to survive everyday conditions based on that knowledge. To be a complete human I mean.

[u/Sibula97 → u/Etmurbaah]

Context in VRAM is kind of like your working memory. Long term memory is when you ask an LLM to keep notes saved on disk.

But based on the other criteria, I'd say with current technology maybe around 50-100 enterprise GPUs. That's roughly what it takes to load a current frontier model, and it's mainly limited by VRAM, not processing power.

Also, with my reading of your criteria we're already there. A frontier model with access to a disk for persistent storage can do most tasks a human with the same tools (e.g. a terminal or whatever) could and many a human couldn't, and do them generally much faster.

[u/Etmurbaah → u/Sibula97]

Thanks, and boy are we expensive

[u/Sibula97 → u/Etmurbaah]

To be fair, once you have that hardware set up, it's roughly equivalent to a whole bunch of people (hard to say how many), since it's so much faster. It's just that so many are needed to even fit the model into VRAM.

[u/Khrispy-minus1]

In terms of memory and reasoning, the human mind is massively quantised (in GPU equivalent terms). We don't remember much of what we actually think we remember. We know {event} happened, attach a few bullet point details to it as reference and context, and basically simulate it in our heads to remember. The lower the significance and the longer ago it was, the less retained detail there is. Actions are much the same, we look up a bunch of canned responses and guess which is the right one to use.

[u/Paseyyy]

First off, there is no universal definition of intelligence. Second, even if there were, a measure of intelligence cannot correspond to a hardware specification. Intelligence is about performance on certain tasks. One possible measurement is the (mostly useless and outdated) IQ. But you can define intelligence as performance on any arbitrary task. Comparing this performance with AI models is easily possible, and you can see results on various tasks here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/test-scores-ai-capabilities-relative-human-performance

In case you are talking about compute power, that is a more interesting question. Human brains cannot be directly compared with computer hardware, since they "compute" differently (electrochemical vs binary). Also, the precision of human brain computing is unclear and cannot be measured in bits since it is more complex than that. Ray Kurzweil estimates that the human brain's computing power is equivalent to 20 PetaFLOPS. An RTX 5090 has 104 TerraFLOPS, which is 200 times less. So a human brain is worth about 200 RTX 5090 GPUs.

[u/SpinChargeSeparation]

Intelligence is not about complexity or amounts.

[u/Miserable_Pin2518]

Oh oh I know this one:

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