I don’t actually know if this is true, but the intuition I have is that this huge expenditure of energy is just the result of speeding through evolution. Our neural structures have evolved for hundreds of millions of years. The aggregate energy cost of that evolution has been enormous, but the result is a compact, hyper-efficient brain. Who’s to say that on the other end of this we’re not going to end up with the same in silicon?
Even if that were the case, it seems wasteful/pointless to have to go through all of biological evolution every time one wants to label images or generate some text.
