> Are you serious? I don't think you have to be an expert to see that the average human can perform more work per energy intake than the average GPU.
You're objecting to something I didn't say, which is extra weird because I'm just running with the same 400 W/20 W you yourself gave. All I'm doing here is pointing out that 400 W of electricity is cheaper than 20 W of calories especially as 20 W is a misleading number until we get brains in jars.
To put numbers to the point, at $0.10/kWh * 400 W * 24h = $0.96, while the UN definition for abject poverty is $2.57 in 2023 dollars.
As for my opinion on which can perform more work per unit of energy, that idea is simply too imprecise to answer without more detail — depending on what exactly you mean by "work", a first generation Pi Zero can beat all humans combined while the world's largest supercomputer can't keep up with one human.
> It's very much a problem, good luck trying to even emulate the 3D neural structure of the brain with lithography.
IIRC by volume a human brain mostly communication between neurones; the ridges are because most of your complexity is a thin layer on the surface, and ridges get you more surface.
But that doesn't even matter, because it's a question of the connection graph, and each cell has about 10,000 synapses, and that connectivity be instantiated in many different ways even on a 2D chip.
We don't have a complete example connectivity graph for a human brain. Got it for a rat, I think, but not a human, which is why I previously noted that we don't really understand how our brains are architected.
> And there are few other processes that can create structures at the required scale, with the required precision.
Litho vastly exceeds the required precision. Chemical synapses are 20-30 nm from one cell to the next, and even the more compact electrical synapses are 3.5 nm.