Hacker News Reader

Comment by polotics | Hacker News Reader

We are extremely energy-efficient. My lunch was one fruit, had no breakfast, a bit hungry but can still type in the sequence of word you're reading right now. Compare this with the wattage of OpenAI, from what I can find 2.9 Watt-hours for one query, so 2.4 kcal, ie. the whole daily-maintenance food need for an average man...

View on HN

Other than the cal/kcal issue, I'm also curious if this comparison really pans out. If you had a fusion power plant, you could power processors with it, but how does raw power translate into human food? Even if you had some formula like Soylent Green, many humans would probably not cooperate after a while

I think your math is off by a bit. A Calorie and a watt-hour are approximately equal. Humans need about 2000 Calories per day. So 2.9 watt-hours is more like the amount of energy a human needs in a minute.

I think the confusion might come from the Calorie/calorie difference, i.e. 1 Calorie = 1000 calories = 1 kcal.

You're missing a few orders of magnitude here - the daily food intake of a man is 2400kcal, not 2.4kcal.

We are still much more efficient mind, 2400kcal is approx 2.7kWh so about 1000 GPT queries if your 2.9Wh figure is correct (wow!)

You're off by a factor of 1,000. The "calories" used for nutritional purposes are actually kilocalories, and a typical adult diet is about 2,000 kcal per day.

I think you mean 2.4 Mcal, or 2400 kcal, to keep a man alive for a day...

Efficiency doesn't matter if you have spare energy to use and can't. We have all the food we can eat and we remain dumb fucks.

With nuclear power and a way to scale up we could build a gigawatt tier brain if we wanted to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com