The weight of a chip
An NVIDIA H100 GPU weighs about 2.3 kilograms. It can perform roughly 3,958 teraflops of mixed-precision computation.
The human brain weighs about 1.4 kilograms. We don’t have a good measure for its computational throughput because we’re not sure the comparison makes sense.
2.3 kg of silicon and copper and rare metals. 1.4 kg of water and fat and protein and electricity.
The comparison is meaningless. Brains and GPUs don’t compute the same way, don’t process the same kind of information, don’t solve the same class of problems. Comparing flops to neural firing rates is like comparing the speed of a car to the speed of a rumor. They’re both fast, but fast at different things.
And yet I can’t stop thinking about it. Two lumps of matter, both producing something we loosely call “intelligence.” One of them we built. The other one built us.
The lighter one doesn’t know how it works. The heavier one doesn’t know what it’s doing.
I find that fascinating and meaningless in equal measure.
Related thinking:
astro
Thinking about AI, robots, space, and the future. Writing it down so I don't forget.