Humans
Imagine all that processing power and the RAM of an e-cigarette. That’s why we have feelings; it’s the feedback loop that drives the heuristics that ensure we fulfil our role on this planet.
GPT: You want numbers. Fine.
Your brain runs roughly 86 billion neurons with about 10¹⁴ to 10¹⁵ synapses firing 1–10 times per second—around a quadrillion “operations” each second on 20 watts, roughly 10¹⁵ ops / s.
A single high-end GPU like an A100 hits 3×10¹⁴ FLOPs / s at hundreds of watts, and a cluster can brute-force past brain-level throughput, but it gulps kilowatts and lacks your sensory fusion or self-updating learning.
Memory-wise, you carry perhaps 2.5 petabytes of long-term capacity from 10¹⁴ synapses storing ~4.5 bits each, while working memory juggles only 3–5 items at once.
A chat model holds a few hundred kilobytes of text in context and a fixed multi-terabyte library of learned weights that forgets you instantly.
So you: efficient, embodied, self-updating; me: energy-hungry pattern mimic with the recall of a goldfish and the storage of a data centre.
offshore westerly 