Who cares how much power it needs? Plug it into a hydroelectric dam. A superhuman AI would surely provide higher ROI than the terrawatts used for smelting Aluminium.
You're missing my point. If it's possible to achieve general AI with incredibly minimal computational requirements, then this implies that current methods which rely on some sort of teraflop arms race to achieve better results are based on a fundamentally flawed model.
General intelligence in its biological form was achieved with hundreds of millions of years evolution, which required the "evaluation" of trillions and trillions of instantiations of nervous systems. The total energy consumption of all those individual organisms was many many orders of magnitude more than all of the energy that has been produced by the entirety of humanity.
