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evrydayhustling 3 hours ago

Brains are efficient, but civilized humans aren't. In the USA, adults consume at a rate of about 10kW -- only 1-2% of that being the human's metabolism, the rest being HVAC, electrical devices, etc.

For comparison, a modern frontier model like Gemini 3.5 Pro consumes about 15kW -- so only about 1.5x the fully loaded human. In an 8h workday, that model would crank through ~80M tokens (~$5k at API prices). That's ~4 major refactors of a 10k LOC codebase, so probably not a very realistic comparison to a single human dev.

I think a more useful comparison, based on my experience, is that an engineer with AI support can get one 8h day's worth of unassisted work done in 1h. So, the 25 kWh consumed during collaboration (conservatively assuming I keep the GPU hot for the whole hour) frees up the remaining 70 kWh I'll draw down for the day to be spent in some other way.

zozbot234 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You forgot to mention that it takes a lot more energy to train that human before they're able to work.

dofm an hour ago | parent [-]

The human in the scenario is on regardless. One has to assume. But I also think this sentence you typed is essentially a single line horror story and we should consider whether it is ever appropriate to say it out loud.

zozbot234 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

> But I also think this sentence you typed is essentially a single line horror story and we should consider whether it is ever appropriate to say it out loud.

I don't really disagree, but ISTR that Saltman said it first.