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by ben_w 409 days ago
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?