Google helps map millimeter of human brain tissue that comes in at 1.4 petabytes

https://9to5google.com/2021/06/01/google-human-brain-map/

by rexbee • 5 years ago

35 14 5 years ago

Men have an average 12600 mm^3 volume brain size. So, hypothetically, that means the average brain is about 17640 Petabytes of just raw organic data.

Something tells me were still a few centuries off from "true AI."

lebed2045• 5 years ago

from purely storage prespective: right now you can buy 1Tb microSD card (1^12 bytes), which is about 7800x more than first 128Mb microSD card introduced in 2005, so x^15 = 7800 => x = 1.8 i,e 80% improvement a year (I know it's super vogue approximation but helps to get the order of magnitude). Extrapolate that for 17k Petabytes, and we get 1.8^y = 17000 => y = 17, so less than a century for sure. anothing thing, that likely for AI the topology of the brain wiring is more important than raw organic data

iaw• 5 years ago

I don't know if storage is the right metric, perhaps something closer to RAM is, or particularly VRAM. If that's the case then we have a bit farther than 17 years to go.

tartoran2• 5 years ago

Yes but not all parts have to be active simultaneously. Like our long term memories are stored on a long term type of media in the brain so could an artificial life agent store those on a different type of media, maybe it could be heavily compressed or self erasing over time

MeinBlutIstBlau3• 5 years ago

We're not even counting the storage of memory, storage of connections between them, and dynamic growth of storage.

burnished2• 5 years ago

no, you're misreading this. First, you can't extrapolate that out, the sample was of cortical tissue which while expansive is just a thin layer. Second, thats the size of the imaging data, it doesn't mean anything about human compute in the slightest.

MeinBlutIstBlau3• 5 years ago

Hence why I said "raw organic data." I didn't say memories or exactly the space of an actual brain. Plus, it's just a simple fun way to think of something in terms we can understand. I as well as everybody else is fully aware it's not that simple.

johnlorentzson• 5 years ago

I agree with your conclusion but I don't think it can just be extrapolated like that.

nynx• 5 years ago

While this is a lot of data if you extrapolate to a full brain, a lot of signs point towards the data you'd need to actually simulate a brain being much smaller than that — possibly between 20-100 PB.

tartoran2• 5 years ago

I agree, a rudimentary one at least should be possible with less. A human brain is not active all at once either and large parts of the brain are dedicated with decoding or other limiting factors of human hardware

astrange• 5 years ago

Human genomes are typically stored as a diff from a reference genome (100GB -> 15MB), so you could do the same here.

Although if you can disentangle memories from the rest of the brain recording, you'd probably want to try running your own memory on Einstein's brain and see what that's like rather than actually use yours. It wouldn't be you, but a scan of your brain is not you either.

Google helps map millimeter of human brain tissue that comes in at 1.4 petabytes

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