A thought provoking leading question I have is (1) a space heater throws power into a coil and generates heat and nothing more in the world (2) an LLM into a GPU throws power into the GPU and generates heat and organized information.
Is (2) generating less heat so that the laws of thermodynamics account for the increased amount of "useful stuff" generated (the organized information)? Switch (2) for a bitcoin miner if you prefer.
Is the act of increasing order in the data, somehow costing some energy? Is there a fundamental minimum cost to flipping bits? Something about the switch of energy to matter and back, seems involved here.
I think the nature of computation is holding some secrets about the meaning of the universe, if there is any.
> Is there a fundamental minimum cost to flipping bits?
Yes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
But modern computers are nowhere near this theoretical limit, nor any of the other limits I mentioned above. Nevertheless, most of heat generated from modern CPUs does come from bits turning on and off. Each transistor is a tiny capacitor, that holds a charge when its ON. When it switches OFF, it dumps that charge down the drain, creating waste heat. This is a limitation of our technolgy, not a fundamental limit of physics.
Could be worse, though; early chips would disipate heat even when they weren't doing anything. CMOS improved this enormously by pairing up "complementary" transistors so current only flows when something changes.
Still, from the universe's point of view, what we consider a super advanced computer is a lot closer to a space heater than anything that pushes up against its computational limits. Consider, for example, that quarks operate on time scales of 10^23 Hz, and the universe is happy to run three of those in every proton in every star in the universe. In fact, it runs 10^24 of them for one CPU, and that same CPU can't even simulate the quarks of one proton in real time.
Let's face it: we're like kids in Minecraft who think it's cool watch a calculation of 2+2 trickle through a redstone computer in a minute, while the GPU is rendering a billion triangles every second to give them that view.
I think you should consider the gigawatts of heat generated to create the LLM model to make it a more fair comparison.