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Might not be efficient, but at least it... Uhhh, wait, what good does it provide again?
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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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Compare 1 human to one LLM session, instead of one human to all LLMs on Earth, and you’ll see that we’re way less efficient
Also, one human brain training takes feeding for years before it can do useful things.
Does that actually add up, though?
Google released stats recently that the median Gemini prompt consumes about 0.24 watt hours of electricity.
For humans performing knowledge based labor, how many prompts is that worth per hour? Let's say that the average knowledge worker is about as productive as one good prompt every 5 minutes, so 12 per hour or 96 per 8-hour workday.
Let's also generously assume that about 25% of the prompts' output are actually useful, and that the median is actually close to the mean (in real life, I would expect both to be significantly worse for the LLM, but let's go with those assumptions for now).
So on the one hand, we have a machine doing 384 prompts (75% of which are discarded), for 92 watt hours of energy, which works out to be 80 kilocalories.
On the other hand, we have a human doing 8 hours of knowledge work, probably burning about 500 calories worth of energy during that sedentary shift.
You can probably see that the specific tasks can be worked through so that some classes of workers might be worth many, many LLM prompts, and some people might be worth more or less energy.
But if averages are within an order of magnitude, we should see that plenty of people are still more energy efficient than the computers. And plenty aren't.
You completely forgot that workers only work one time the shift per day. If you account for the total energy required to do a project, and assume that a human would do alone X in 5 days, then wouldn’t it be better to use prompting as well, which would theoretically, in this model, make X feasible in 2.5 days? Sure, the non-work calories consumption of a human is inevitable, but when strictly talking about productivity, you can make an individual be 2x more productive for a lot less than their daily calories consumption
I however appreciate your analysis and the time you took to write this. It’s really nice to see a comparison. I would have imagined it consumed a lot less than that.
If you compare this to letting a desktop computer run though… it’s negligible. I know mine uses about 80W when idle