Tomorrow is Today

“Google and Stanford have created the [digital equivalent of the] visual cortex of an infant human”

Jeff Dean and his team from Google, working with Andrew Ng and Quoc Le from Stanford University, have effectively created a rudimentary, low-resolution digital version of the brain’s visual cortex.

The system, which comprises of a cluster of 1,000 computers (totaling 16,000 processor cores), analyzes 10 million 200×200 still frames from YouTube. Over 3 days, the system’s software builds up a network of hundreds of neurons and thousands (millions?) of synapses. During this period, the system tries to identify features — edges, lines, colors — and then creates object categories based on these features.

The rather intriguing result is that, when the system looks at an image of a cat, a specific (digital) neuron fires — just like in a human brain. Watching the system in action — watching the neurons light up — is almost like performing a virtual, digital MRI scan. In the picture below, you can see the contents of the “human face” neuron, alongside some of the stimuli that successfully trigger the neuron.

(via Google and Stanford create a digital brain that, like an infant, learns to identify a human face from scratch | ExtremeTech)