Silicon vs. Carbon: A Tale of Two Intelligences

Silicon Intelligence vs. Carbon Intelligence: A Tale of Two Energies



“Artificial Intelligence” is a misnomer, if you ask me. I’d rather call it Silicon Intelligence. After all, it runs on silicon chips (at least for now) and is powered by electricity. By contrast, human intelligence is carbon-based—built from DNA and fueled by bioelectricity.

Ultimately, all that energy—whether from a GPU cluster or a human brain—traces back to the sun:

  • The past sun powers us via coal, oil, and gas.

  • The present sun drives wind turbines, solar panels, and photosynthesis (plant food included).

Preset Parameters and the Art of Learning

When a baby is born, much of their foundational “mental model” is wired by genetics. As Charlie Munger famously quipped, “They’re like machines with 80% of the parameters preset.”

But humans are also learning machines. We don’t recompile—we reflect. And if we’re lucky, we wake up “a little less stupid” each day.

Large language models improve similarly—via fine-tuning and reinforcement learning—except instead of sleep, they have gradient descent.

Specialized Minds in a Diverse AI Ecosystem

Even in the AI world, specialization reigns. Einstein might have revolutionized physics, but you wouldn’t put him on the court against Michael Jordan.

Likewise:

  • OpenAI excels at reasoning and logic.

  • DeepSeek writes poetry with elegance.

  • Claude leads the charge in AI coding.

  • Groq brings real-time inference to life.

Each model shines in its own domain—like brilliant minds in different professions. This isn't a winner-takes-all game. Or perhaps… it’s just early days.

Silicon vs. Carbon: A PhD’s Playground

As a long-time data miner (since before "big data" was cool), I still find joy in drawing analogies between carbon-based and silicon-based intelligence.

Both have structure. Both adapt. Both surprise us.
And both are, in their own way, solar-powered search engines—just with vastly different substrates.


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