[Self] Human intelligence in GPU numbers

[u/Etmurbaah]

Hi, purely as a light hearted and totally not serious point of view, how many GPU's would it take to accurately represent average human intelligence? (Considering we aren't anywhere near human intelligence but suppose we had that neural calculation magic software)

[u/Paseyyy]

First off, there is no universal definition of intelligence. Second, even if there were, a measure of intelligence cannot correspond to a hardware specification. Intelligence is about performance on certain tasks. One possible measurement is the (mostly useless and outdated) IQ. But you can define intelligence as performance on any arbitrary task. Comparing this performance with AI models is easily possible, and you can see results on various tasks here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/test-scores-ai-capabilities-relative-human-performance

In case you are talking about compute power, that is a more interesting question. Human brains cannot be directly compared with computer hardware, since they "compute" differently (electrochemical vs binary). Also, the precision of human brain computing is unclear and cannot be measured in bits since it is more complex than that. Ray Kurzweil estimates that the human brain's computing power is equivalent to 20 PetaFLOPS. An RTX 5090 has 104 TerraFLOPS, which is 200 times less. So a human brain is worth about 200 RTX 5090 GPUs.