Summary: The effort required to manually do the calculations an LLM does to answer a simple query (in Chinese, for the Searle’s Room reference) is about what it’d take to build a modern million-man city from scratch.
Model:
Say a human can perform 1 multiply-accumulate (MAC) operation every 5 seconds.
First, we produce an estimate for single token generation for Llama 3 8B: 8 billion parameters, about 2 MAC operations per parameter, and with some additional overhead for attention mechanisms, feedforward layers, and other computations, estimate 50 billion MAC operations per token.
That’s 250×109 seconds/token ≈ 70×106 hours.
Estimate full-time work for a year is 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, 50 weeks/year ≈ 2000 hours/year.
For building a city, the most important factors are
Infrastructure Construction (3–5 years):
Roads, bridges, and transportation networks.
Water supply systems (reservoirs, pipelines, treatment plants).
Sewage and waste management systems.
Electrical grids, telecommunications, and internet infrastructure.
Labor: ~10,000 workers.
Man-years: 30,000–50,000 man-years.
Residential and Commercial Buildings (5–10 years):
Construction of housing for ~1 million people (apartments, single-family homes).
Building commercial spaces (offices, shops, markets).
Interior finishing and utilities installation.
Labor: ~20,000 workers.
Man-years: 100,000–200,000 man-years.
Including planning and design, site preparation (clearing land, building access road, and excavation for foundations), estimate about 150,000–300,000 man-years depending on the size.
Validating this estimate, the city of Brasília, built in the 1950s, took about 5 years to construct a city for ~500,000 people, involving ~60,000 workers, which translates to ~300,000 man-years.
Assuming it scales proportionally with population, manually performing the calculations to answer a simple Chinese query is about as hard as building a city with 1–2 million population.
Technique: DeepSeek, but I cut down its verbose answers.
Summary: The effort required to manually do the calculations an LLM does to answer a simple query (in Chinese, for the Searle’s Room reference) is about what it’d take to build a modern million-man city from scratch.
Model:
Say a human can perform 1 multiply-accumulate (MAC) operation every 5 seconds.
First, we produce an estimate for single token generation for Llama 3 8B: 8 billion parameters, about 2 MAC operations per parameter, and with some additional overhead for attention mechanisms, feedforward layers, and other computations, estimate 50 billion MAC operations per token.
That’s 250×109 seconds/token ≈ 70×106 hours.
Estimate full-time work for a year is 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, 50 weeks/year ≈ 2000 hours/year.
70×106 hours ÷ 2,000 hours/man-year ≈ 35,000 man-years/token.
Tokens in a simple Chinese question + answer pair:
Question: ~5–10 tokens; Answer: ~10–30 tokens; Total: ~15–40 tokens.
So in total, about 500,000–1,500,000 man-years.
For building a city, the most important factors are
Infrastructure Construction (3–5 years):
Roads, bridges, and transportation networks.
Water supply systems (reservoirs, pipelines, treatment plants).
Sewage and waste management systems.
Electrical grids, telecommunications, and internet infrastructure.
Labor: ~10,000 workers.
Man-years: 30,000–50,000 man-years.
Residential and Commercial Buildings (5–10 years):
Construction of housing for ~1 million people (apartments, single-family homes).
Building commercial spaces (offices, shops, markets).
Interior finishing and utilities installation.
Labor: ~20,000 workers.
Man-years: 100,000–200,000 man-years.
Including planning and design, site preparation (clearing land, building access road, and excavation for foundations), estimate about 150,000–300,000 man-years depending on the size.
Validating this estimate, the city of Brasília, built in the 1950s, took about 5 years to construct a city for ~500,000 people, involving ~60,000 workers, which translates to ~300,000 man-years.
Assuming it scales proportionally with population, manually performing the calculations to answer a simple Chinese query is about as hard as building a city with 1–2 million population.
Technique: DeepSeek, but I cut down its verbose answers.