The wall confronting large language models

Sauro, if you read this, please refrain from such low-content speculative statements:

“On a loose but telling note, this is still three decades short of the number of neural connections in the human brain, 1015, and yet they consume some one hundred million times more power (GWatts as compared to the very modest 20 Watts required by our brains).”

No human brain could have time to read all the materials of a modern LLM training run even if they lived and read eight hours a day since humans first appeared over 300,000 years ago. More to the point, inference of an LLM is way more energy efficient than human inference (see the energy costs of a B200 decoding a 671B parameter model and estimate the energy needed to write the equivalent of a human book worth of information as part of a larger batch). The main reason for the large energy costs of inference is that we are serving hundreds of millions of people with the same model. No humans have this type of scaling capability.

And yet, the human brain is still (way way wayyyyyyyyy) more capable than the LLMs at the actual thinking. They're as wide as an ocean and as shallow as a puddle in a pothole. And we didn't need to read all of the internet to do it.

As for the "write a book" part, the LLM will write a book quickly sure, but a significant chunk of it will be bullshit. It will all be hallucinated, but the stopped clock will be right some of the time.

No humans have this scaling capability? What do you call the reproductive cycle then? Lots of smaller brains, each one possible specialized in a few fields, together containing all of human knowledge. And you might say that's not the same thing!, to which I reply with "let's not kid ourselves, Mixture-of-Experts describes exactly this".

Agency may be better understood as Michael Levin's approach where e.g. a lifeform is something that can achieve the same goal using various methods (robust).

Having said that, you can now simply move the goal posts to say that while one human cannot read that much in that amount of time - the collective of all humans certainly can - or at least they can approximate it in a similar fashion to LLM's.

Since each of us can reap the benefits of the collective then the benefits are distributed back to the individuals as needed.

Certainly all of humanity could approximate the reading of an LLM for now. The energy consumption of humanity is about 20TW at this point, so over 20,000 times higher than the next generation LLM training runs. Just like the LLM training does not only spend energy on their “brain” neither does humanity.