gwern

Fast forward to early 2015. Eventually I found a buyer for the companies code & technology in January 2015. The investor offered either $100,000 or 300 bitcoin, which had dropped in value at that time to a little more than $200 a coin. I took the lower cash value bitcoin deal because I believed it was the next big thing and an official buyout would’ve been very difficult for someone under 18 and it was good tax planning to use Bitcoin. Also continuing to do day trading on a daily basis.

Don't you have to pay full income or capital gains tax on it either way, so accepting the Bitcoins merely cost you a ton of money? I don't see how it makes a difference whether you took dollars & used them to buy Bitcoins or took Bitcoin directly or took Indian rupees - you still have to pay tax on the assets of the business you sold, no?

At 3 hours per second to simulate 2.5m neurons, that is 10,800 seconds : second; log_2 10800 = 13.4 doublings or since each doubling takes 1.5 years, 20 years. So the existing model could be run in realtime at the same price in 20 years, assuming no optimizations etc.

To run in realtime and also to scale up to 10 billion neurons? Assuming scaling is O(n) for simplicity's sake, that means we need to run 4000x more neurons (10b/2.5m); log2 4000 is 11.97 or 12 more doublings, or another 18 years.

So in 38 years, one could run the current model with 10b neurons in realtime.

(Caveats: not clear Moore's law will hold that long, this is assuming equal price point but we can safely assume that a working brain would be run on a supercomputer many years before this 38 year mark, scaling issues are waved away, etc.)

Wow, 2 Lain fans on the team! Y'all have my upvotes.