Readit NewsIt's how little energy the brain uses, especially for learning. The brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI on a classical computer, not to mention still beating it in terms of performance and versatility. Transistors do not use millions of times more energy than synapses, and processor feature sizes are not millions of times larger. Something else is going on.
Either the brain is leveraging QC or our AI training algorithms are just really really horrible compared to whatever is happening in biology. Maybe biology found learning methods that work thousands of times better than differential backpropagation.
I don't know about that... I've consumed quite a few calories in my lifetime directly, plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet) and I still only have a minuscule fraction of the information in my head that a modern LLM does after a few months of training.
Translated into KWh, I've used very roughly 50,000 KWh just in terms of food calories... but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4... GPT5 itself needing about 25x to 30x as much energy to train... certainly not 100s of thousands to millions of times as much. And again, these LLMs have a lot more information encoded into them available for nearly instant response than even the smartest human does, so we're not really comparing apples with apples here.
In short, while I wouldn't rule out that the brain uses quantum effects somehow, I don't think there's any spectacular energy-efficiency there to bolster that argument.
Betaine was first isolated from beets, hence the name, and as the other name, trimethylglycine, hints it has 3 easily donated methyl groups, so if you do need those for some reason it may be useful to you. It's also pretty cheap and unlikely to be harmful.
Edit: I found this... https://www.strongerbyscience.com/betaine/