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The Brain's Impossible Efficiency: 20 Watts

The Brain's Impossible Efficiency: 20 Watts

The Brain's Impossible Efficiency: 20 Watts Here's a number that should make every computer scientist uncomfortable: 20 watts. That's the power consumption of an adult human brain. A typical incandescent light bulb uses more. A laptop uses three to four times as much. A

Landauer's Limit: The Physics of Erasing Information

Landauer's Limit: The Physics of Erasing Information

Landauer's Limit: The Physics of Erasing Information In 1961, a physicist at IBM named Rolf Landauer asked a question that seemed almost philosophical: What is the minimum energy required to perform a computation? The answer he found wasn't philosophical at all. It was thermodynamics. And it

The Compute Ceiling: Why AI Hit a Wall

The Compute Ceiling: Why AI Hit a Wall

The Compute Ceiling: Why AI Hit a Wall In 2020, OpenAI trained GPT-3. It took approximately 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity—enough to power 120 American homes for a year. The cost: somewhere between $4 million and $12 million, depending on how you count. In 2023, GPT-4

The Intelligence of Energy

The Intelligence of Energy

The Intelligence of Energy Every thought you think costs calories. Every AI response burns watts. Every calculation, biological or silicon, requires energy—and that energy has to come from somewhere. This isn't a metaphor. Intelligence is expensive, and the bill comes in joules. We're used to