AI notes

 
https://hai.stanford.edu/blog/what-computations-role-neuroscience
AI, and what I call NI — natural intelligence — going to converge at some point and really be use
our brain contains about 100 billion of neurons. 
 
"One individual neuron ­— and our brain contains about 100 billion of them — is incredibly complex: incredibly complex shapes and incredibly complex biophysics, and different types of neurons in our brain have different types of physics. They’re profoundly non-linear, and they are hooked together in these synapses and ways that form circuits, and understanding and mapping those circuits is a big fundamental problem in neuroscience.
But something that should give all of us great pause is that there are these substances that are released locally in the brain called neuromodulator substances, and they actually diffuse to thousands of synapses in the space around them in the brain, and they can completely change that circuitry. This is beautiful, beautiful work by Eve Marder, who spent her career studying this neuromodulation. You take one group of neurons that are hooked up in a particular way, spritz on this neuromodulator, and suddenly they’re a different circuit, literally."

Newsome: And another feature of brain architecture, that you and I have talked about offline together, is that brain architecture is almost universally recurrent. So area A of the brain has a projection to area B. You can kind of imagine that as one layer in the deep convolutional network to another layer. But inevitably, B projects back to A. And you can’t understand the activity of either area without understanding both, and the non-linear actions, the dynamical interactions that occur to produce a state that involves multiple layers simultaneously.

Dynamics are, again, another universal feature of brain operation. They reflect the dynamics in the world around them, and the input but also the dynamics in the output. You’ve got to have dynamical output in order to drive muscles to move arms from one place to the other, right? So the brain is much richer, in terms of dynamics.