For an average day (incl. "non-working" hours) the brain uses far less at ~300Wh, and if you include the body the average person needs ~2.3 kWh.
In the rest of the article, they estimate inference electricity use is only ~8% of overall datacenter use, and if we think of the datacenter as the "body" in which the GPU / brain wouldn't work without, that's an overall median use of ~16 kWh for only 24 Claude Code requests.
I'm more impressed with the human brain's energy efficiency + multimodality + long term context + malleability than anything after using LLMs a bunch, even though I learnt a lot about that in a neuropsych course long time ago.
How did you arrive at that calculation?
For an average day (incl. "non-working" hours) the brain uses far less at ~300Wh, and if you include the body the average person needs ~2.3 kWh.
In the rest of the article, they estimate inference electricity use is only ~8% of overall datacenter use, and if we think of the datacenter as the "body" in which the GPU / brain wouldn't work without, that's an overall median use of ~16 kWh for only 24 Claude Code requests.
I'm more impressed with the human brain's energy efficiency + multimodality + long term context + malleability than anything after using LLMs a bunch, even though I learnt a lot about that in a neuropsych course long time ago.