Scientists make a pocket-sized AI brain with help from monkey neurons : NPR

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Researchers using data from macaque monkeys were able to shrink an AI vision model to a tiny fraction of its original size.

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A human brain consumes less power than a light bulb, while artificial intelligence systems guzzle electricity to do the same tasks.

Now, scientists have created a highly efficient AI model that hints at how living brains are able to do so much with so little, a team reports in the journal Nature.

The model, which mimics a part of the brain’s visual system, started out using 60 million variables. But the team was able to compress it into a version that performed nearly as well using just 10,000 variables.

“That is incredibly small,” says Ben Cowley, an author of the study and an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “This is something we could send in a tweet or an email.”

The compact model also appears to work more like a living brain, which could help scientists study what goes wrong in diseases like Alzheimer’s, Cowley says.

More broadly, if the AI model really does replicate strategies found in nature, it could help scientists understand the inner workings of human brains, says Mitya Chklovskii, a group leader at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute, who was not involved in the study.

Compact, biology-inspired models of the brain could also lead to “more powerful and more humanlike artificial intelligence,”…

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