Weekly Newsletter, May 1 2026

A back-of-the-envelope calculation I made as I was finalizing my decision to abandon AI:

Claude Opus has about 200,000 tokens. It costs "a few tens of millions" of dollars to train, which takes six weeks to "train to mastery" at 1.3 GW per hour. Not to mention the millions of dollars being dumped into prompt engineering, the last hiring field in computer science, that's just a bunch of sad, overworked engineers, quite literally training their replacement.

The human brain, on the other hand, has about 86 billion neurons. It can learn to tell the difference between a cat and a dog in pretty much any environment, regardless of lighting quality and background noise, in, I don't know, an hour, especially with the help of one normal, regular, human teacher. Using about 97 Watts a day, give or take.

But please, tell me more about the incredibly imminent and inexorable singularity when AI outperforms the human brain, making the trillions of dollars invested in AI infrastructure, power consumption, and job loss all totally, super, we swear it's going to pay off for humanity any day now, worth it.