Anupam Mittal, founder of Shaadi.com and a prominent investor on Shark Tank India, recently pushed back against AI doomsday fears with a sharp reality check: replacing humans isn’t happening anytime soon. In a viral post, he broke down why today’s AI, despite its hype, can’t touch the human brain’s efficiency or depth, using simple analogies to highlight the massive technical chasm.
The Brain’s Insane Efficiency
Anupam Mittal pointed out that mimicking one human brain with current AI would demand a football-field-sized data center running non-stop. That’s to handle basics like seeing, thinking, learning and deciding in real time. Yet your brain pulls off the same feats on just 20 watts of power, roughly what a dim LED bulb uses. Scale up to the brain’s full biological magic, with neurons, synapses, chemical signals and adaptive plasticity, and you’d theoretically need a computer the size of planet Earth. This gap, he argued, gets overlooked in the rush to crown AI as humanity’s successor.
AI’s Real Strengths and Limits
AI shines at what it’s built for: crunching patterns, automating repetitive tasks and extracting insights from massive datasets. Think image recognition, chatbots or stock predictions, where throwing more data and GPUs delivers clear wins. But human hallmarks like judgment, creativity, contextual nuance, taste and the wisdom to hold back? Those aren’t fixed with bigger models or fine-tuning. Mittal called them “emergent properties” honed over millions of years of evolution, letting the brain learn continuously across domains while compressing the world’s chaos into efficient decisions.
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Why No Fundamental Shift Yet
Progress in AI relies on scaling transformers and neural nets, but Anupam Mittal stressed this hits walls without rethinking intelligence itself. Brains don’t brute-force compute; they evolved sparse, energy-sipping architectures that generalize wildly from sparse data. AI’s “miracle” deficit isn’t just smarts, he said, but packing god-level complexity into a skull-sized package fueled by sugar and oxygen, with less waste heat than a light bulb. Until breakthroughs in neuromorphic computing or bio-inspired paradigms emerge, human replacement stays sci-fi.
Bigger Picture for Creators and Workers
Anupam Mittal’s take reassures knowledge workers, artists and executives: AI augments, it doesn’t obsolete. Tools like Grok or GPT excel as co-pilots for drafting, ideation or analysis, but the spark to connect dots uniquely, sense cultural vibes or pivot on gut instinct? That’s human turf. For India’s startup scene, where Mittal invests heavily, this means leaning into AI for scale while betting on irreplaceable traits like founder vision and market intuition to build enduring companies.
