A colony of ants operates similarly to a brain with each ant acting like a single neuron. They communicate by smell and their language is pheromones. It's incredibly complex. This is a great way to visualize it.
Humans are kind of unique in that we can work together just like ants for a larger goal. Very few species are able to do this. The goal of course can be pretty fucked up in regard to humans.
The swarm of ants are all family and have worked together their entire lives. If you just took a bunch of unrelated ants comparable to some “swarms” of humans, the ants would probably just kill each other. The right group of humans with familiarity and practice could be smarter as a group but it requires teamwork and letting egos go. The way we go about forming groups in modern society may be a bit flawed.
Parallelism is what made machine learning even possible, it's a foundation. GPUs on which AI runs are made from a thousand dumb cores, unlike CPU, which is a dozen smart and beefy cores. And those data centers where it lives are thousands of GPUs
Machine Learning, the most popular AI right now, was first studied in the 1950's and more or less "solved" by the 1970's. We just didn't have the compute power to make it happen until super powerful GPU's came out.
That's why I put it in quotes. There's still a ton of research going on with it. But they had the basis for working models, that first major milestone.
They laid the basis for modern models in the same way Aristotle laid the basis for modern math. Even convolutional neural networks, the ones that allowed parallelism to be achieved in the first place, didn't exist in 70s
Intelligence is an emergent property of information processing. If a network of individual cells can communicate information effectively, intelligence can emerge from that system. I think this video is a great example of that
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u/SegelXXX 2d ago edited 2d ago
A colony of ants operates similarly to a brain with each ant acting like a single neuron. They communicate by smell and their language is pheromones. It's incredibly complex. This is a great way to visualize it.