Ilker

What If We Stopped Using GPUs? | YC Paper Club

Ilker, Alok, Sean

This event examines the stagnation of FLOPS-based efficiency in current AI hardware and proposes alternative architectures that align with biological constraints, such as feed-forward pathways and the elimination of backpropagation's weight transport problem. Speakers detail emerging solutions including zero-order optimization techniques like SPSA combined with the Sharded Optimization Mixture of Assemblies strategy, alongside hardware innovations in optical computing and neuromorphic systems that prioritize energy scaling and memory-compute co-location. The discussion culminates in a case study on biological computing, specifically the collaboration with Cortical Labs to train human brain cell cultures to play *Doom*, illustrating a novel paradigm where intelligent behavior emerges from entropy minimization in a distributed, non-digital substrate.