Dwarkesh Patel
Hosts the Dwarkesh Podcast, a long-form interview show on AI progress, timelines, and the people building frontier models, along with economists and historians.
“If I think about how the brain works versus what you're describing here, the differences might be that while you can do structured sparsity in these accelerators, in the brain there's unstructured sparsity — any neuron can connect to any other neuron, not in ways where they'd be column aligned. Then there's the fact that memory and compute are co-located. Maybe that actually isn't a big difference. The other difference is that the clock cycle in the brain is much slower than on computers, partly to preserve energy.”
Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · May 2026
Context
Offered near the end of a blackboard lecture on chip design, as Dwarkesh works out which brain-versus-silicon differences are actually fundamental and which are artifacts of how we build things. He talks himself out of one of his own three candidates mid-list. Pope's reply is that the co-location point is exactly right.
Transcript
branch predictor to like execute both branches at once or what does it do?
…I actually need to jump to wherever the target is and run these instructions instead. And so the purpose of the branch predictor is genuinely to predict based on before you even get to this instruction to be like five cycles earlier to predict there was going to be a branch that's going to happen.
So if I think about how the brain works versus what you're describing here, at a high level, the differences might be that while you can do structured sparsity in these accelerators and then save yourself some area that you would have otherwise had to dedicate to these gates, in the brain, there's unstructured sparsity. Any neuron can connect to any other neuron and not in ways where they'd be column aligned or whatever. Then there's a fact that memory and computer are co-located. I guess you could say in a way the memory and computer are co-located on
this is exactly the co-location in some sense of the memory. That's right. That's right.
Yeah. Yeah, so maybe that actually isn't a big difference. And the other, maybe a big difference is that the clock cycle on the brain is much slower than on computers. And partly that's to preserve energy because the faster the clock cycle, the bigger the voltage needs to be in order to identify…
That's right.
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