AI Snake Oil

To generate a single tokenpart of a wordChat GPT has to perform roughly a trillion arithmetic operathat ended tions. If you asked it to generate a poem up having about a thousand tokens (i.e., a few hundred words), it would have required about a quadrillion calculationsa million billion. To appreciate the magnitude of that number, if every single person in the world together performed arithmetic at the rate of one calculation per minute, eight hours a day, a quadrillion calculations would take about a year. All that to generate one single response.