- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
“It also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”
Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/21/sam-altman-would-like-remind-you-that-humans-use-a-lot-of-energy-too/
People are incredibly efficient compared to machines of any kind. You can’t run a machine that long on 2000 calories of energy, which is what enough energy to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree celsius.
Or the food definition is raising a kilogram of water 1 degree celsius, so the food calorie is a calorie*1,000.
Life is way way more efficient than machines, that take a lot of energy, not the least AI that uses like 6x as much or whatever as normal computer operations, last I heard.
Altman is a confidence man, emulating Musk and his ilk, this is who society respects, not people that do anything great, but people who hype stock prices and make people think they will do great things.
Note that dietary calories are kilocalories, so 2,000 calories of food is 2,000,000 calories from a physics standpoint.
This issue goes away if you use the proper SI unit, the joule.
Kilocalories are basically watt-hours. How many images do you think a kilowatt gaming rig can generate in two hours, versus a human being drawing all day long?
Yeah images is actually a bad example for us humans. Using a small model with a modern lora, you can generate near photorealistic images, easily 1 every second or so on moderate hardware.
Granted we can make 1 “perfect” image better than most big image models typically can even with lots of time, but thats a different discussion.
Whilst nothing you say here is wrong, humans have a tendency to want more things than machines. A place to live (perhaps a mansion with its own pool), transportation (maybe a private jet or a million dollar supercar) and other general recreation (such as a datacenter full of GPU’s hallucinating cartoons of scantily clad women). So really, a human is pretty energy intensive when you think about it, compared to their rather low number of working hours (eesh, sleep takes so much time).