How much computing power did evolution use to create the human brain?

Ajeya Cotra attempted to calculate this number in her paper “Forecasting Transformative AI

with Biological Anchors”.

[...]the total amount of computation done over the course of evolution from the first animals with neurons to humans was (~1e16 seconds) * (~1e25 FLOP

FLOP

A unit used to quantify computing power. One FLOP represents one calculation with floating-point numbers (numbers with a decimal point). “FLOPs” can be the plural of “FLOP”, but is confusingly also sometimes used interchangeably with “FLOPS”, meaning “FLOP per second”.

/s

FLOP/s

Sometimes “FLOPS”. Short for “floating-point operations per second”. FLOP/s represents the number of mathematical operations involving floating-point numbers that a computer can perform every second, and is a measure of the computer’s computing power.

) = ~1e41 FLOP

Nuño Sempere argues that this calculation of the computation done by neurons may be an underestimate, as the environment would also need to be simulated.

Cotra posits that this number should be taken as an upper bound to the amount of computation needed to develop AGI

. The actual amount of computation needed is probably many orders of magnitude lower.