Information throughput of biological humans and frontier LLMs

post by benwr · 2025-02-22T07:15:45.457Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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Biological humans appear, across many domains, to have have an information throughput of at most about 50 bits per second. Naively multiplying this by the number of humans gives an upper bound of about 500 gigabits per second when considering the information throughput of humanity as a whole.

Current frontier LLMs collectively produce around 10 million tokens per second^[1]; this translates to a collective output (and thus maximum throughput) of roughly 100 megabits per second.

These are both upper bounds, and so there's not much reason to directly compare them. I'm not sure exactly what to do with these numbers, though I think they're interesting, and this kind of thinking might in principle ultimately lead to more reasonable estimates of the strategic capacity of humanity and/or AI agents. For example, the concept of "empowerment" in reinforcement learning is expressed in terms of channel capacity.

1. ^{^}

   I haven't carefully checked Deep Research's answer here, but it accords with my basic guess, based on looking at OpenRouter's weekly token chart.

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