To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just ‘Meat Computers’

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.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/business/meat-computer-brain-artificial-intelligence.html