Do you think companies which can train 1 Trillion parameter models and hire AI researchers at $100 mil salaries can't build a 302 neuron simulator if they really wanted?

Maybe. Why can't those same companies do any number of highly profitable but seemingly difficult things? If you throw enough cryptographers at the problem are you guaranteed a quick solution to breaking modern encryption primitives at the theoretical level?

The rate at which you can find a solution to a particular problem that's rooted in theory very often won't scale with resource investment. The problem will have unknown prerequisites in the form of yet undiscovered theoretical advancements in other areas of research. Until you identify and solve those other problems you very often won't be able to arrive at a satisfactory answer to the one you're interested in.

So in many cases the only viable route to solving a particular problem faster is to scale the amount of research that's done in general since science as a whole is embarrassingly parallel.

> If you throw enough cryptographers at the problem are you guaranteed a quick solution to breaking modern encryption primitives at the theoretical level?

We have very strong reasons to believe this is not possible, no matter how much resources you spend on this problem. In fact the whole of modern cryptography kind of relies on this assumption, that the problem is unsolvable.

I agree with your general point, but I don't think it applies to the worm problem. We know hundreds of millions were not spent on that problem.

Right but my point there is that it might be possible to break a particular encryption primitive. But throwing more money at the problem is almost certainly not going to get you an answer one way or the other any time soon. Whereas waiting 50 years (ie performing more fundamental research in general) might. Or might not.

The worm problem is similar. If our current theories were "good enough" we would be able to simulate them. I see no reason to believe (and many to doubt) that throwing more money at the problem would solve it much faster. For that to be true we would among other things need to be capable of articulating where precisely the current shortfalls are to begin with.

I mean that looks like an empirical question? They definitely want to, the open worm project is well on their radar and it doesn’t work yet

Eh, it depends on how good your want your simulation to be.

A worthwhile executable brain image would have to produce behavior (e.g. speech, action) like the person it is from. The author of the cited article is saying that we can't simulate the worm's brain well enough to get anything close to the richness of the worm's behavior.