[ExI] matrioshka brains again, was: RE: Symbol Grounding

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
>...> On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
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>...At some point, surely, someone will start getting plausible answers to questions like 'How do we achieve practical fusion power plants/space-based solar power/drexlerian nanotechnology/mind uploading/indefinite life-extension/abundance economy for those who want it/give everyone in the world a chance to lead the lives they want to lead while simultaneously preventing any megolomaniac fuckheads wiping us all of the face of the earth, etc.?...I mean, what's the point of a superintelligence if it can't help with any of those?  Ben
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Thanks Ben, great introduction for me to restart a discussion we had for years in this forum, and ask for new insights from the GPT jockeys among us please.

When he was still with us, Robert Bradbury used to come to the west coast periodically and work with me on the mechanical details of Matrioshka Brains.  I am sorry to report that since he passed on, I have made little progress on the idea.  My last formal presentation on that topic for an engineering group was made in 2011.  I do not know if anyone has worked on the idea since then, as I have been caught up in real-world matters such as parenthood.

Question for our GPT hipsters please, or anyone else who wishes to comment:

Given a Matrioshka Brain ring with each processor consuming the power which can be generated by 100 cm^2 of solar cells at 1 AU (we can go with about 20 mW as a reasonable conservative estimate (well below the record with current technology)) with a minimum latency between adjacent nodes of about 3 microseconds, with a cell-phone-ish 256GB of on-board memory per node, and given a trillion such nodes, can we park an effective GPT-4 chatbot on that?  

What I have described in the paragraph above is the most recent (about 2016-ish) BOTEC design of a single ring of a Matrioshka Brain.  Never mind the other rings for now, let's look at just one ring, for I am told GPT4 needs jillions of processors to do its magic, and the thermodynamics problems with a Matrioshka Brain are far from resolved.  Robert and I never did agree on this while he was with us.  But for one ring, we don't care about that open question.  Thermodynamic details cheerfully available on request.

spike