Energy cost per operation in brains and AI hardware: What is more efficient?

Authors

Jan Karbowski

Published in

The Behavioral and brain sciences. Volume 49. Pages e465. Oct 02, 2026. Epub Oct 02, 2026.

Abstract

Haueis and Colaço point out that mammalian brains are much more energy efficient than AI supercomputers because the former use orders of magnitude less energy. I argue this issue is more nuanced, and the "efficiency" is scale dependent. Contrary to popular belief, I show that the human brain uses much more energy per operation than the most powerful AI supercomputers.

PMID:
42825754
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 02 Oct 2026.

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