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Naveen Rao on Biological Efficiency vs. AI Brute Force ======================================================
Naveen Rao on Biological Efficiency vs. AI Brute Force ======================================================  ### a16z
@a16z
Unconventional AI CEO Naveen Rao on the incredible energy efficiencies of biological systems relative to technology:
"Biology sort of started small, figured out some basic principles, and those principles scaled. So the efficiency came first."
"What we've done is actually the inverse. We've brute forced our way through it, throwing everything we possibly could, and now we're understanding, 'Oh actually I didn't need to do all of that, there's a lot of things I can keep chipping away at, and I can go smaller, and smaller, and smaller.'"
"Just to kind of put it in perspective — biology, through this process of kind of the bottoms-up — a squirrel runs on 10 milliwatts of energy. Your cell phone runs on about one watt."
"10 milliwatts, and it can do things at precision levels that we cannot do in a megawatt. I can't make a robot jump between branches in the wind and hit the branch perfectly a thousand times out of a thousand right now. I can't do it." @NaveenGRao @unconvAIShow More
00:46
Mar 11, 2026, 5:52 PM View on X
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One Sentence Summary
Unconventional AI CEO Naveen Rao contrasts the extreme energy efficiency of biological systems with the brute-force approach of modern AI infrastructure.
Summary
In this interview snippet shared by a16z, Naveen Rao (CEO of Unconventional AI) discusses the fundamental efficiency gap between biology and technology. He points out that while current AI relies on 'brute force' and massive power consumption, biological systems like squirrels operate on mere milliwatts while performing complex physical tasks that robots cannot yet replicate. Rao suggests the future of AI lies in 'chipping away' at complexity to achieve higher precision at much smaller scales.
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Naveen Rao on Biological Efficiency vs. AI Brute Force | ... ===============