Energy cost per operation in brains and AI hardware: What is more efficient?

Abstract Haueis and Colaço point out that mammalian brains are much more energy efficient than AI supercomputers because the former use orders of magnitude less energy. I argue this issue is more nuanced, and the “efficiency” is scale dependent. Contrary to popular belief, I show that the human brain uses much more energy per operation than the most powerful AI supercomputers.