alt Hacker NewsNature has already set an absurdly high bar. The human brain runs on roughly 20 watts, yet delivers a level of intelligence we still can't clearly define, let alone replicate. Nothing we've built comes close... either in capability or efficiency. We're still very early in understanding what "intelligence" even means, much less engineering it. so, we have a long way to go, and push.
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A 1980's desk calculator can multiply two 8 digit numbers with much less energy than your brain takes to do the same.
Modern LLM's similarly beat the human brain in lots of tasks for energy efficiency - mostly by the fact the LLM can produce the answer in 1 second and the brain has to spend half an hour researching and drafting something.
> Nothing we've built comes close... either in capability or efficiency.
Only when you look at stuff that the brain is specifically good at.
You can surpass the brain with even simple mechanical adders or an abacus in certain subdomains.
Depending on how you convert synapse count to parameters, the brain also has something like a thousand trillion parameters. In that light it's pretty darn surprising that an artificial neural network can produce anything like coherent text.