[wongarsu]

Each person uses about 100W (2000kcal/24h=96W). Running all of humanity takes about 775GW.

Sure, using or not using your brain is a negligible energy difference, so if you aren't using it you really should, for energy efficiency's sake. But I don't think the claim that our brains are more energy efficient is obviously true on its own. The issue is more about induced demand from having all this external "thinking" capacity on your fingertips

[program_whiz]

Is there an AI system with functionality at or equal to a human brain that operates on less than 100W? Its currently the most efficient model we have. You compare all of humanity's energy expenditure, but to make the comparison, you need to consider the cost of replicating all that compute with AI (assuming we had an AGI at human level in all regards, or a set of AIs that when operated together could replace all human intelligence).

[pixl97]

>all human intelligence

So, this is rather complex because you can turn AI energy usage to nearly zero when not in use. Humans have this problem of needing to consume a large amount of resources for 18-24 years with very little useful output during that time, and have to be kept running 24/7 otherwise you lose your investment. And even then there is a lot of risk they are going to be gibbering idiots and represent a net loss of your resource expenditure.

For this I have a modern Modest Proposal they we use young children as feed stock for biofuel generation before they become a resource sink. Not only do you save the child from a life of being a wage slave, you can now power your AI data center. I propose we call this the Matrix Efficiency Saving System (MESS).

[tlb]

No one will ever agree on when AI systems have equivalent functionality to a human brain. But lots of jobs consist of things a computer can now do for less than 100W.

Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.

[9dev]

> Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.

Add to that the tier-n dependencies this urban lifestyle has—massive supply chains sprawling across the planet, for example involving thousands upon thousands of people and goods involved in making your morning coffee happen.

[wongarsu]

Wikipedia quoted global primary energy production at 19.6 TW, or about 2400W/person. Which is obviously not even close to equally distributed. Per-country it gets complicated quickly, but naively taking the total from [1] brings the US to 9kW per person.

And that's ignoring sources like food from agriculture, including the food we feed our food.

To be fair, AI servers also use a lot more energy than their raw power demand if we use the same metrics. But after accounting for everything, an American and an 8xH100 server might end up in about the same ballpark

Which is not meant as an argument for replacing Americans with AI servers, but it puts AI power demand into context

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

[Aerroon]

>Is there an AI system with functionality at or equal to a human brain that operates on less than 100W?

Obviously not equal to a human brain, but my GPU takes about 150W and can draw an image in a minute that would take me forever to replicate.

[wongarsu]

Obviously we don't have AGI so we can't compare many tasks. But on tasks where AI does perform at comparable levels (certain subsets of writing, greenfield coding and art) it performs fairly well. They use more power but are also much faster, and that about cancels out. There are plenty of studies that try to put numbers on the exact tradeoff, usually focused more on CO2. Plenty that find AI better by some absurd degree (800 times more efficient at 3d modelling, 130 to 1500 times more efficient at writing, or 300 to 3000 times more efficient at illustrating [1]). The one I'd trust the most is [2] where GPT4 was 5-19 times less CO2 efficient than humans at solving coding challenges

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x?fromPaywa...

2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-24658-5

[Majromax]

I did some math for this particular case by asking Google’s Gemini Pro 3 (via AI studio) to evaluate the press release. Nvidia has since edited the release to remove the “tons of copper” claim, but it evaluated the other numbers at a reported API cost of about 3.8 cents. If the stated pricing just recovers energy cost, that implies 1500kJ of energy as a maximum (less if other costs are recovered in the pricing). A human thinking for 10 minutes would use sbout 6kJ of direct energy.

I agree with your point about induced demand. The “win” wouldn’t be looking at a single press release with already-suspect numbers, but rather looking at essentially all press releases of note, a task not generally valuable enough to devote people towards.

That being said, we normally consider it progress when we can use mechanical or electrical energy to replace or augment human work.