Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In a recent viral social media post, a podcaster named Akash Gupta shared results from a 2024 study of the human brain.

Study, he said, should mass humble every AI lab on the planet.

That's a quote.

In it, scientists digitally mapped a cubic millimeter of the human brain, equivalent to two

grains of sand, and the results mind-boggling.

The abstract for the paper described the spec as containing, and I quote, about 57,000

cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and about 150

million synapses, comprising 1.4 petabytes. Now, a petabyte is a measure of memory capacity. So, as one

website described it, a typical DVD holds 4.7 gigs of data. That means a single terabyte of storage would hold 217 DVD quality movies, while a single petabyte of storage would hold over 220,000 DVD quality movies.

Now, since the whole human brain is much, much larger than a cubic millimeter, the spec,

that means that every person is walking around with a few hundred million DVDs worth of data

in their heads.

And that, Gupta concluded, puts our work with AI within a much larger context.

Quote, we're building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we're trying to imitate.

Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.

The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull.

The data center required to merely describe one millionth of it would span

140 acres. In other words, as impressive as their work is, the very best brains working in IT

have a long way to go before their creations come close to what's inside an ordinary person's head.

And yet it's notable that our very best creations are indeed

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