Grok does the math: all 8B humans would take 26 minutes to output one token
mimi10v3 · x · 2026-09-22
- A user asked Grok to compute what it would take to simulate its inference with "humans + calculators": each token costs 6.4e11 FLOPs (320B active params), while each human manages 0.05 ops/sec.
- Verdict: 13 trillion people would be needed for 1 token/sec; Earth's full 8B population yields roughly one token every 26 minutes.
- Grok added the engineering caveats: storing weights on paper takes petabytes, and shipping activations around the globe for coordination would be slower still — a classic China-brain thought experiment applied to linear algebra.
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