cover of episode Jim Keller: Moore’s Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles

Jim Keller: Moore’s Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles

2020/2/5
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Jim Keller 认为人脑和计算机在运作机制上存在巨大差异,难以进行直接比较。计算机的核心在于内存和计算,而人脑的运作则更为复杂,信息存储和处理方式也大相径庭。他深入探讨了计算机工程的分层抽象特性,从原子到数据中心,层层递进,并阐述了指令集架构的相对稳定性以及现代计算机的并行计算机制,包括发现式并行和已知并行。他详细解释了分支预测技术在提高计算机性能方面的作用,以及其背后复杂的算法和资源消耗。他还探讨了计算机设计中的艺术和科学成分,以及团队协作的重要性。此外,Keller 还对摩尔定律的未来发展趋势进行了预测,他认为摩尔定律并非即将消亡,其持续性在于持续的技术创新,而非仅仅依靠晶体管尺寸的缩小。他认为,晶体管尺寸的缩小还有很大的潜力,并且计算机架构设计需要适应晶体管数量的增加。他还探讨了计算性能的提升与数学抽象之间的关系,以及人工智能技术的发展趋势。他认为,人工智能技术的发展将推动数学计算的进步,并带来新的计算模式。最后,Keller 还谈到了他对人工智能潜在风险的看法,以及他对未来科技发展趋势的展望。

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Jim Keller discusses the differences and similarities between the human brain and a computer. He highlights the distinct architectures of memory and computation in computers compared to the distributed nature of information storage and processing in the human brain. He also touches upon the challenges of comparing the two due to our limited understanding of how the human brain truly works.
  • The human brain's workings are not fully understood, making direct comparisons with computers challenging.
  • Computers have distinct memory and computation units, while the human brain integrates these functions.
  • Neural networks in computers mimic the distributed nature of information in the brain, but the underlying computations are straightforward.

Shownotes Transcript

Jim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, having worked at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and now Intel. He's known for his work on the AMD K7, K8, K12 and Zen microarchitectures, Apple A4, A5 processors, and co-author of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect.

This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.

This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code "LexPodcast". 

Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

00:00 - Introduction 02:12 - Difference between a computer and a human brain 03:43 - Computer abstraction layers and parallelism 17:53 - If you run a program multiple times, do you always get the same answer? 20:43 - Building computers and teams of people 22:41 - Start from scratch every 5 years 30:05 - Moore's law is not dead 55:47 - Is superintelligence the next layer of abstraction? 1:00:02 - Is the universe a computer? 1:03:00 - Ray Kurzweil and exponential improvement in technology 1:04:33 - Elon Musk and Tesla Autopilot 1:20:51 - Lessons from working with Elon Musk 1:28:33 - Existential threats from AI 1:32:38 - Happiness and the meaning of life