by Mentlo | 2025-08-11 14:01:09+00:00
Reading your two comments in conjunction - I find your take reasonable, so I apologise for jumping the gun and going knee first in my previous comment. It was early where I was, but should be no excuse.

I feel like if you're going to go down the route of the energy consumption needed to sustain the entire human organism, you have to do that on the other side as well - as the actual activation cost of human neurons and articulating fingers to operate a keyboard won't be in that range - but you went for the low ball so I'm not going to argue that, as you didn't argue some of the other stuff that sustains humans.

But I will argue the wider implication of your comment that a like-for-like comparison is easy - it's not, so leaving it in the neuron activation space energy cost would probably be simpler to calculate, and there you'd arrive at a smaller ChatGPT ratio. More like 10-20, as opposed to 100-200. I will concede to you that economies of scale mean that there's an energy efficiency in sustaining a ChatGPT workforce compared to a human workforce, if we really want to go full dystopian, but that there's also outsized energy inefficiency in needing the industry and using the materials to construct a ChatGPT workforce large enough to sustain the economies of scale, compared to humans which we kind of have and are stuck with.

There is a wider point that ChatGPT is less autonomous than an assistant, as no matter the tenure with it, you'll not give it the level of autonomy that a human assistant would have as it would self correct to a level where you'd be comfortable with that. So you need a human at the wheel, which will spend some of that human brain power and finger articulation, so you have to add that to the scale of the ChatGPT workflow energy cost.

Having said all that - you make a good point with MoE - but the router activation is inefficient; and the experts are still outsized to the processing required to do the task at hand - but what I argue is that this will get better with further distillation, specialisation and better routing however only for economically viable task pathways. I think we agree on this, reading between the lines.

I would argue though (but this is an assumption, I haven't seen data on neuron activation at task level) that for writing a command-line tool, the neurons still have to activate in a sufficiently large manner to parse a natural language input, abstract it and construct formal language output that will pass the parsers. So you would be spending a higher range of energy than for an average Chat GPT task

In the end - you seem to agree with me that the current unit economics are unsustainable, and we'll need three processes to make them sustainable - cost going up, efficiency going up and usefulness going up. Unless usefulness goes up radically (which it won't due to scaling limitations of LLM's), full autonomy won't be possible, so the value of the additional labour will need to be very marginal to a human, which - given the scaling laws of GPU's - doesn't seem likely.

Meanwhile - we're telling the masses at large to get on with the programme, without considering that maybe for some classes of tasks it just won't be economically viable; which creates lock in and might be difficult disentangle in the future.

All because we must maintain the vibes that this technology is more powerful than it actually is. And that frustrates me, because there's plenty pathways where it's obvious it will be viable, and instead of doubling down on those, we insist on generalisability.