To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just ‘Meat Computers’
To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just ‘Meat Computers’
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/business/meat-computer-brain-artificial-intelligence.html
Publish Date: 2026-05-24 05:01:00
Source Domain: www.nytimes.com
The relationship between mind and machine has long fascinated philosophers and scientists, who have likened the human brain to clocks, chronometers and, in more recent decades, computers. In the early days of artificial intelligence, academics referred cheekily to humans as “meat machines.”
Lately this framing has trickled into the vernacular of tech executives. Elon Musk posted on social media last summer, “We are all dumb meat computers compared to digital superintelligence.”
Andrej Karpathy, an A.I. executive and a founder of OpenAI, wrote in a widely read post that “A.I. research used to be done by meat computers in between eating, sleeping, having other fun, and synchronizing once in a while using sound wave interconnect in the ritual of ‘group meeting.’
“That era is long gone.”
Larry Ellison, a co-founder and the executive chairman of Oracle, said in a 2025 event: “The brain is very specialized. So are the A.I. models. But we’re not building a 20-watt meat computer. We’re building a 1.2 billion-watt A.I. brain.”
How it’s pronounced
/mēt kəm-pyü-tər/
This comparison of human and machine — and the suggestion that non-meat computers are superior — has not landed well with a public anxious about the A.I. future. It fits into a broader trend in which executives pit humans against robots and conclude that humans don’t quite measure up. When Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said in February that, while it takes electricity to train chatbots, “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” media outlets and social media users jumped on the comments as misanthropic and even dystopian.
People have long sought to “explain the mind through the most powerful technology we have,” said Raphaël Millière, an associate professor at the University of Oxford and affiliate of its Institute for Ethics in A.I. But lately, the meat computer metaphor has gone from an explanatory analogy to marketing language that aims to “move…
