Synapses might be akin to transistor count, which is only roughly correlated with FLOPs on modern architectures.
I've also heard in a recent talk that the optic nerve carries about 20 Mbps of visual information. If we imagine a saturated task such as the famous gorilla walking through the people passing around a basketball, then we can arrive at some limits on the conscious brain. This does not count the autonomic, sympathetic, and parasympathetic processes, of course, but those could in theory be fairly low bandwidth.
There is also the matter of the "slow" computation in the brain that happens through neurotransmitter release. It is analog and complex, but with a slow clock speed.
My hunch is that the brain is fairly low FLOPs but highly specialized, closer to an FPGA than a million GPUs running an LLM.
I've also heard in a recent talk that the optic nerve carries about 20 Mbps of visual information. If we imagine a saturated task such as the famous gorilla walking through the people passing around a basketball, then we can arrive at some limits on the conscious brain. This does not count the autonomic, sympathetic, and parasympathetic processes, of course, but those could in theory be fairly low bandwidth.
There is also the matter of the "slow" computation in the brain that happens through neurotransmitter release. It is analog and complex, but with a slow clock speed.
My hunch is that the brain is fairly low FLOPs but highly specialized, closer to an FPGA than a million GPUs running an LLM.