Semiconductors: Why Is the Human Brain More Energy Efficient Than LLMs?
Human memory is dominated by thick sets, keeping it energy and intelligence efficient, beyond digital memory and LLMs.
The brain is often said to use up a fifth of the entire energy of the body, the most of any organ. The brain is far more energy efficient than large language models. There is a recent daily comment in The New Yorker, The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I. stating that, “It’s been estimated that ChatGPT is responding to something like two hundred million requests per day, and, in so doing, is consuming more than half a million kilowatt-hours of electricity. (For comparison’s sake, the average U.S. household consumes twenty-nine kilowatt-hours a day.)”
How is the brain able to process so much, yet consume so little energy?
The first place to look is memory, where human memory does not have an exactness of all the events it has ever interpreted. This is different from the exactness of digital memory. Also, the human memory does not bring to recollection, everything it possesses at the same time, making the selection process, not just to recall, but for intelligence, exceeding pedestrian digital memory — then LLMs, for creativity, emotions…
