Insights

Practical primers and explainers for builders and decision-makers.

Insights

You are running on twenty watts

Your brain runs a whole mind on less power than a fridge bulb. Physics permits computing ten thousand to a million times better than we manage. The expensive part was never the thinking, it was the commute.

Gaurav Gandhi Aug 12, 2026 6 min read 1,373 words

A tiny glowing compute chip linked by a long track of travelling data packets to a distant memory bank, showing that AI's energy cost is the commute, not the computation.

Insights

Most of the energy AI uses isn't spent thinking

Training one large model can burn 1,287 megawatt-hours. Physics says the same arithmetic could have cost about eight watt-hours. Where the difference goes, what we tried, and what failed.

Gaurav Gandhi Aug 11, 2026 9 min read 2,033 words