The human brain uses 20 watts, so yeah we figured out a way to run better than human brain computation by using many orders of magnitude more power. At some point we'll need to reject exponential power usage for more computation. This is one of those interesting civilizational level problems. There's still a lack of recognition that we aren't going to be able to compute all we want to, like we did in the pre-LLM days.
For 20 watts of work on stuff like this for about 4 hours a day counting vacations and weekends and attention span. So 20 hours of rest, relaxation, distraction, household errands and stuff, so that maybe bumps it up to 120 watts per work hour. Then 22.5 years of training or so per worker, 45 year work period, 22.5 year retirement. So double it there to 240 watts. We can't run brains without bodies, so multiply that by 6 giving 1440 watts + the air conditioning, commuting to school and work, etc., maybe 2000 watts?
We're getting close to parity if things keep getting more efficient as fast as they have been. But that's without accounting for the AI training, which can on the plus side be shared among multiple agents, but on the down side can't really do continuous learning very well without catastrophic forgetting.
