while humans won't be the most intelligent beings for much longer, we're by far peak intelligence per watt: the entire human body consumes only 100 watts. an 8xB300 running a frontier model takes 14,000. we're at least two orders of magnitude more efficient, and that's compared to the not-quite-human-level LLMs of today: i'd expect AGI to be three or four orders of magnitude more energy intensive than humans (claude fable, for example, is rumored to be designed to run on a GB200NVL72, which consumes 120,000 watts). what's more, human watts are easy to come by on earth: we're omnivores that evolved for billions of years to consume pretty much whatever's already on the surface of the planet. machine watts require deep drilling into the earth for gas, or mining for uranium, or megaprojects like mass solar or hydro. humans just eat whatever's already around. in the year 1500, we sustained our entire civilization with only 46 gigawatts across the entire planet: that's equivalent to about 300k machines capable of running claude fable... but at the time, we sustained 500MM human intelligences. three orders of magnitude more!
of course this is cheating, a bit. while it takes a GB200NVL72 to run claude fable, the *throughput* on one machine is higher than single-instance-claude. but even if claude fable on an NVL72 can run 40 concurrent requests at interactive speed, that's still only a single OOM knocked off. humans are just extremely, extremely efficient. evolution forced us to be
machine intelligence will be many times faster to scale, but the small cluster of humans of earth will still be far more efficient for human-intelligence-sized tasks that don't need millisecond speed. as the cost of physical labor drops to near zero with robotics, the future of humanity probably looks more like communes, with human needs tended to by robotic farming and medicine, while human caretakers of machines and each other carry out the tasks that humans can, slowly tending to skyscraper-tall GPU monoliths, raising children, overseeing robotic laborers and farmhands, eating grapes off the vine and fresh eggs from chickens in the pasture. money is largely irrelevant for the day to day when housing, food, drink, and medicine can be satisfied with just the cost of electricity, and at 1000x higher efficiency per unit of human-sized intelligence, we'll have a happy little niche carved out for ourselves
what will your job be on the commune?