Let’s say a human needs an average of 2000 calories a day. A calorie is roughly equivalent to 1 Watt hour, so over 20 years, it takes about 15 MWh to sustain a human.
Let’s say a single A100 has a peak power draw of 250W, and you need 100 to train an LLM. So each hour of training consumes 25,000 Wh of energy. 15 MWh / 25,000 W = 600 hours, or 25 days, which is probably pretty close to the true training time.
So the numbers are actually pretty close. But a human brain doesn’t start out as a set of random weights like an LLM. The human brain has predefined structure that’s the result of an extremely long evolutionary process.
