Artificial neurons that behave like real brain cells

Sigh. The problem with this kind of thing for 'AI' is that brains and LLMs are about connectivity. In semiconductor terms, each neuron has a fanout of about 1000. The GPU folks handle that because everything is just an enormous matrix that's being streamed from fast memory, and if you're multiplying a 1 zillion x 1 zillion matrix then achieving a fanin of 1000 is easy to arrange - you just have 1000 non-zero input cells for each row or column.

But with memristors there's no fanout - if you do it in fixed wires you have have an enormous place and route problem (and an inability to change the connections), and if you do it via a massive in-memory routing table then that's going to eat your power even if your actual neuron is very efficient.

Not to say that better models of neurons aren't useful for eg medical purposes or biological research, but not for today's 'AI'.

Theo

Natural neurones grow their synapses - in our brain that keeps on happening until around 18 years of age - and then proceed to edit out a lot of them - which keeps on going until about age 25.

One of wife's colleagues who used ECG to find out what was happening in the human brain when it processed speech wouldn't look at left-handers like me because the processing happens in different areas in our brain - it is the same processing, but while right-handers typically put the various stages of processing in much the same locations in their heads, left handers mix it up more, and differently, from one to the next.

It doesn't seem to make any difference to the results. Maybe it did back when the speech processing system was evolving to cope with the human languages we were in the process of evolving, some 50,000 years ago.

Growing the connections would be a slow way of setting up the models.