Unlocking AGI: The Human Brain’s Blueprint for True Intelligence

The Human Brain’s Architectural Advantage

In my quest to understand how to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), one factor has emerged as potentially holding a key — the extraordinary density of neurons packed into the human cerebral cortex. Through the groundbreaking research of neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, detailed in her book “The Human Advantage,” one can learn that our brains contains far more neurons per unit volume than even larger animal brains. This densely packed cortical architecture is believed to sustain our advanced cognitive capabilities for abstract reasoning, language, and complex problem-solving. This fact underlined the role of an important factor, brain architecture.

Mimicking Nature’s Design for AGI

As I see the current state of AI, it’s clear to me that while contemporary generative models have demonstrated impressive abilities, their architectures fundamentally differ from biological neural networks. Crucially, they lack the intricate parallelism, the vast connectivity, and especially a more complexe and organized architecture.

To realize the humain dream of AGI, I think that we must move beyond simply scaling up today’s models.

The Tripartite Approach

The Unifying Framework, In my view for building true AGI will necessitate the coordinated advancements across three deeply interconnected domains:

• Architecture: I believe that the current apporach of building ever bigger models is limited. We will need new and innovative neural network architectures that transcend just the increasing depth and parameter counts. Drawing inspiration from the brain’s hierarchical organization, with specialized and densely interconnected regions, will be crucial. Dynamic architectures that can flexibly allocate computational resources based on task demands, with hierarchical processing mirroring the brain’s functional compartments, will be essential. Ultimately, the goal must be to design architectures that not only achieve neuron densities and connectivity rivaling the human cortex itself but also creating more advanced and meaningfull sub modular organisation that I call architecture.

• Data: Just as human intelligence develops through absorbing rich, multi-sensory experiences, I think that AGI systems will require powerful data handling capabilities. This includes seamlessly integrating diverse data streams and preprocessing (ie specific and avanced data representations) across text, images, audio, and more into the learning process. Techniques like unsupervised, self-supervised, and few-shot learning are also critical to enable AGI to glean insights from the vast pools of unlabeled data surrounding us, mimicking how our brains learn from the world. This data-driven approach is essential for enabling the massively-parameterized, biologically-inspired models to attain broad, general intelligence capabilities across multiple domains.

• Compute: In my view, modeling the immense parallelism, highly organised connectivity, and sheer raw computational power of the human brain’s 86 billion neurons will utterly overwhelm the limits of conventional hardware. Specialized AI accelerators, quantum computing, neuromorphic architectures, or other groundbreaking innovations in computational scale and efficiency will likely be required. Without such radical advancements, I fear supporting the staggering processing demands of the massive models and data volumes needed for AGI could prove impossible.

Conclusion:

Based on my research, I’ve come to believe that AGI will not emerge from any singular breakthrough. Rather, it will arise from the joint progression of all three elements in unison — innovative neural architectures inspired by our densely-packed highly organized cortical neurons, powerful data pipelines to fuel learning in these biological-scale models, and the computational resources to run it all at scale. This tripartite approach reflects the convergence of factors that coalesced in the evolution of the human brain itself.

Through this tripartite pursuit invetigating the need to integrating innovations in architecture, data, and compute, all guided by the biological inspiration of the human cortex’s incredible neuronal organization and density, I am convinced we can forge a path towards achieving artificial general intelligence. It remains one of the most profoundly impactful technological frontiers awaiting us.