[bee_rider]

It isn’t obvious to me that these models produce something similar to our brains’ output. We can imagine images of course, but the level of quality is hard to define, and it is really hard and time consuming to save the output of an imagined image.

People paint or draw imagined images, but that’s a slow process and there’s a feedback loop going on throughout the whole thing (paint a bit, see how it looks, try a little happy tree, didn’t work out, turn it into a cloud). If we include the time spent painting and reconsidering, image generation using humans is pretty expensive.

An iPhone battery holds tens of watt-hours. A painting might take hours to make (I don’t paint. A couple hours is quick, right?), so if the brain is burning tens of watts in that time, the total cost could be in the same ballpark as generating images until your battery dies. But of course it is really hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison here because the human spends a lot of energy just keeping the lights on while bandwidth is limited by the rate of arm-movement.