You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place

by Janelle Shane

The most powerful neural networks, the ones that take months and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of computing time to train, have far more neurons than my laptop’s neural net, some even exceeding the neuron count of a single honeybee. Looking at how the size of the world’s largest neural networks has increased over time, a leading researcher estimated in 2016 that artificial neural networks might be able to approach the number of neurons in the human brain by around 2050.1 Will this mean that AI will approach the intelligence of a human then? Probably not even close. Each neuron in the human brain is much more complex than the neurons in an artificial neural network—so complex that each human neuron is more like a complete many-layered neural network all by itself. So rather than being a neural network made of eighty-six billion neurons, the human brain is a neural network made of eighty-six billion neural networks. And there are far more complexities to our brains than there are to ANNs, including many we don’t fully understand yet.