[jjmarr]

If we could directly convert the food energy of a Snickers bar to electricity we could easily power AI. A Snickers bar has 250 kcal, which is 1000 kJ or about 250 grams of TNT.[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=250+kcal+in+joule] chatgpt-4 uses 3.6 kJ to 36 kJ per query so you could get potentially hundreds of queries on a single Snickers bar.

We only need a way to harness the power of the human body. Maybe we put people in VR for fun while using their body heat to power the AI.

[caycep]

But then eventually you need Keanu Reeves to put boundary conditions on the AI

[toast0]

I was watching The Matrix Revolutions last night with my 14-year old. At one point, he told me "hey, that looks like ... Keanu Reeves"

[eru]

TNT and other explosives have relatively little energy per kg compared to eg petrol or snickers.

That's explosives are chemicals selected / designed to be able to release their chemical energy really quickly and without needing any external oxidizer (because harvesting atmospheric oxygen would be too slow). That focus obviously leads to compromises in other areas, like energy density.

[spookie]

The snickers bar allows more than a single query for the human though

[TeMPOraL]

Temporarily, on the margin. A human would need multiple Snickers bars per day to survive, and can't survive on Snickers bars alone for more than couple days or weeks.

Also no human is anywhere close to being as knowledgeable and skilled as LLMs at all the things at the same time, so it hardly even compares.

[kortilla]

> and can't survive on Snickers bars alone for more than couple days or weeks.

lol, the spoiled times we live in that you think this. The human body is capable of surviving on very little.

A thing with protein, fat and sugar would sustain you for incredible amounts of time. Many many months if not years.

[eru]

Only if you also ate some random other stuff you found lying around. Doesn't even have to provide much in the way of energy, just enough 'dirt' to round out your diet with whatever other essentials you need.

Human bodies have evolved to survive for a long time on relatively little, yes. But not to evolve for a very long time on a single source of very 'clean' food like snickers bars. 'Clean' in the sense that chemically snickers has relatively well defined inputs, whereas hungry humans would eat just about anything, including insects and grass and bark or leather.

[kortilla]

This isn’t true. There are countless cases of people surviving for months on nearly no food at all.

I’m not talking about what it takes to stay alive for long term periods. I was refuting the silly idea that you would die after a couple of days/weeks of snickers.

[ben_w]

How much vitamin C is in a snickers bar? I think you'd get scurvy within a month or two if that's all you had.

How much vitamin A? Night blindness. Vitamin B? Neurological issues, confusion.

That's the thing with mono-diets, your body needs a diverse range of things that it can't synthesise itself.

But to the core point, in cases where the output of an LLM is good enough, many already have much lower energy requirements than humans: o4-mini is currently priced at $1.1 per million tokens of input and $4.4/million tokens of output; if that's all being spent on electricity at $0.1/kWh, that's a max of 11 kWh/million tokens in and 44 kWh/million tokens out — how many calories would a human have to burn to read, write, hear, speak, and internally monologue the equivalent of a million tokens?

[drilbo]

days? Pretty sure I could survive at least a couple years off snicker bars

[krisoft]

Probably not years. My guess is that scurvy, beriberi, or some other deficiency would get you in at most a year.

[eru]

Though most of these diseases can be avoided with some minimal fortification to the snickers bar that wouldn't really require noticeably more energy.

[jjmarr]

I don't think I could write lengthy responses to hundreds of questions on a singular Snickers bar. I would need multiple.