Tom Petzinger

Retired from biotech and daily journalism. Proud dad and granddad.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@dlondonwortel Or maybe he just didn’t get around to the barber for a while?

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@samcentric Mark my words: Langdon will do something to protect or rescue Robby.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@cursedhat Speculation: Robby will attempt self-harm and Langdon will save him.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@chrisbriem

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@chrisbriem Then there’s the Frank Lloyd Wright plan for the Point.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@TheRickWilson Am I the only one who thinks the SAVE Act would backfire on the GOP?

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@MichaelMcGough3 Fair point.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@NewYorker I’m convinced that despite their intentions, the act would backfire on the Republicans.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@MLFootball @KingOfPhinland @thebengalorian @SSN_Alabama @BarstoolAlabama @SSN_NotreDame @BarstoolIrish @CoachBobStoops @SoonersInsider @shawnemerriman That’s also where pro football was born.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@rohanpaul_ai @ylecun The child’s data also produces visceral responses, which become further intelligence. Machines will never achieve that.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@newstart_2024 Ray’s been moving the goal posts for years.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@chrisbriem What’s your interpretation? An artifact of tech salaries? Would the change in median income be less impressive?

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@DavidDeutschOxf If we’re that advanced, the slow passengers could just join the faster ones and arrive simultaneously.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet.

1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output.

The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice.

Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.

And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”

This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one.

We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.

The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@CharlesPPierce Nile Rogers has to be on any list.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@r0ck3t23 The experiment is fallacious.
—The control condition cannot exist. Humans have never been in boxes. They created in communities.
—AI creates by scraping human output created outside boxes.
—AI output is testably different than human output.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@AndyStaples @McCoySmith Yeah, but he died young.

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@StevieVanZandt Louis Jordan gets his due here. In other episodes, so do Hank Williams and many other unrecognized forebears of rock. https://t.co/hI6vktYszh

[Tom Petzinger @tompetz]

@StevieVanZandt We all know the great cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly…” by Fugees. But did you know Roberta Flack’s version was also a cover? Original was by Lori Lieberman, written about Don McLean.