
Ask HN: Is Neuromorphic Computing Promising? - hsikka
I just read  https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1705.06963. Specifically, the use of organic materials to build robust, low power networks that get past the von Neumann bottleneck and allow us to incorporate new levels of sensing into our environment and lives seems extraordinary. TPUs and chips are obviously interesting for orgs like google, but what about synthetic clusters of neurons integrated into our environment? How significant could that be?<p>Also, what startups are working on this actively?
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astrocytosis
koniku.com

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astrocytosis
more fleshed-out response:

Yes. Concepts are useless until proven otherwise, but if we want to summarize
a whole field of thought and derivative applications, and if we take a
reasonable heuristic that a thing can be promising if it shows potential
upside without guarantee of success, I would definitively say yes.

For me the phrase is so cool but it lacks sufficient rigor. What's it really
mean to take concepts from the brain and apply them, starting with where do
you draw the boundary line around member approaches? Neuroscience and
computing can inclusively have a lot of overlap: is any logic ‘brain-like’? Do
we need to seperate brain and mind and ‘intelligent’ behavior? Your question
also begs for a metric of what would be promising. Let's try economically
feasible as a filter. There are clear potential benefits to the tech but it's
complex and expensive and mostly early r&d, so you see government initiatives,
academic projects, niche startups, and FAANG (IBM, Intel). The article
citations for this pretty wide field are thorough but here's some personal
highlights:

Koniku, biological neural computation start up | koniku.com

blue brain supercomputer sim project |
[https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/blue-
brain/ab...](https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/blue-brain/about/)

Vicarious neuro-centric robotics startup |
[https://www.vicarious.com/research/](https://www.vicarious.com/research/)

Neuropace anti-epileptic tx device | neuropace.com

Spiking net sim frameworks abound while overshadowed by contemporary ML
platforms, I'll feature nengo | nengo.ai but there's also brian, neuron, nest,
spike… Nengo is primarily maintained by academic startup ABR |
appliedbrainresearch.com/about-us/

Strategic endeavors like Allen Institutes for AI and Brain, Janelia Farms
neuroscience research campus, things like Brain Initiative in US and Human
Brain Project in Europe, DARPA’s continued interest, plus a number of
dedicated world research institutions and departments generate exponential
contributions to the state of the art throughout the abstraction stack. This
top down money/effort is part of the fermentation tank for future
breakthroughs, a parallel to pharmaceutical drug discovery.

Two projects I find interesting if perhaps a lot to live up to Numenta |
Numenta.com OpenCog |
[https://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project](https://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project)

At the top levels deepmind would define itself as a neuromorphic computing
company; youtube interviews with demis hassabis support this. TPU imo is on
the spectrum of a neuromorphic computing device. Elon Musk decided he needed
to start a neuromorphic interface company, founded an (originally) non profit
existential insurance think tank, and aspects of control dynamics and
perception for spacex rockets and tesla autonomous cars all arguably fit into
the concept of neuromorphic computing.

How far down the rabbit hole do we want to go? Do we need to see direct and
immediate impact of r&d or can we value basic research for secondary effects?
What's the goal and value prop of any particular research and what side
effects might it have? It's conceivable this tech leads to such horrors and
wonders as diverse as perfect digital shadows of our consciousness, which we
use as back ups or slaves. It could be integral to autonomous killing robots.
It could birth the first synthetic consciousness. It could cure your
daughter’s disability, or your dementia. It could grow you a chicken breast
without the attached chicken. It might give rise to something as menial as an
ad algorithm that’s 5% better or profound as collective consciousness or the
end of humanity. At this level of abstraction, tech is a double edged sword
that is morally always about how you use it.

Again, promises from people and tech are both often broken, and there’s good
reasons to be dismissive or pessimistic. I think there’s significant chance
competing technologies win out for a lot of envisioned use cases. Momentum is
behind our massive legacy development ecosystem for information processing,
and maybe linear algebra brute force function approximators will prove ever
sufficient and cost effective. Commercialization is a high bar. Perhaps the
implications and risk is ‘too great’, and we decide to morally shun this path.
Some systems or understandings of cognition could prove indecipherable and yet
necessary. Instability renders the organizational complexity and resource
investment required outside the scope of human ability.

Inevitably, time will weed out fledgling neuromorphic developments into
whatever real-world penetration and impact they achieve, over whatever rate of
adoption. Seems unlikely that nothing at all will ever come of any of it.

I need to wrap this comment but there's so many potential applications from
immediate domain things like prosthetics and medical devices, bci's up to
power efficient and scaling substrate for AGI or 100x improvement in robotics
that it’s hard for me to not get excited about how promising this discipline
is, it’s practically a holy grail of disruption. To me many macro trends like
Moore's Law, AI renaissance, robotics, Theoretical + Computational + *
Neuroscience, better and more medical measuring modalities and data,
escalating capability and economic incentive for automation, incentive for
medical knowledge and advances, the feedback loop of neuroscience developments
advancing computing advancing neuroscience ...plus others… weigh in its favor.
Personally this lends a lot credence to a (long term) bullish view for
progress. Worth noting, time studying this topic has felt oddly - meditative?
Or maybe cosmic is apt. There’s an inherent aspect of self discovery in
building off of and deepening understanding of the brain mechanistically, both
individually as a human research who contains/is a brain and collectively as a
planet of them.

To OP, if you expand on what you mean by synthetic, environmentally embedded
neuron clusters I’d be happy to associate and speculate with you.

