Nina Schick: we are industrializing superintelligence — intelligence-per-watt is the new power law
NinaDSchick · x · 2026-11-04
Responding to the argument that a human brain runs on just 20 watts, Nina Schick argues the comparison misses the point: human intelligence can't recursively learn as fast as AI, isn't insatiable for compute, and can't be distributed like a utility via computing infrastructure.
- Her thesis: we are industrializing (super)intelligence, and the real question is efficiency — intelligence-per-watt.
- Training superintelligence may take 2-5 GW, but inference (distribution) costs are in free fall; intelligence-per-watt has improved 100,000x in ten years, forming a new power law.
- She cites OpenAI reportedly spending $10M with 10,000 agents working 88 hours as evidence of the trajectory.
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