- A human uses between 100W (naked human eating 2000kcal/day) to 10kW (first-world per capita energy consumption).
- Frontier models need something like 1-10 MW-years to train.
- Inference requires .1-1kW computers.
So it takes thousands of human-years to train a single model, but they run at around the same wall clock power consumption as a human. Depending on your personal opinion, they are also .1-1000x as a productive as the median human in how much useful work (or slop) they can produce per unit time.
- A human uses between 100W (naked human eating 2000kcal/day) to 10kW (first-world per capita energy consumption).
- Frontier models need something like 1-10 MW-years to train.
- Inference requires .1-1kW computers.
So it takes thousands of human-years to train a single model, but they run at around the same wall clock power consumption as a human. Depending on your personal opinion, they are also .1-1000x as a productive as the median human in how much useful work (or slop) they can produce per unit time.