I do believe that this is the trade off. We are more efficient but slower in terms of thinking (at the same level of intelligence). Some animals go much further in terms of that trade off, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider) for example.
Just checked wikipedia page... they have like 100K neurons only.. wtf!!! How can nature cramp all senses, including spatial, motion, life maintenance and general thinking into just 100K neurons?
A lot of the low level stuff is outsourced to biochemistry: the physical properties of proteins, and the various self-regulating biochemical systems of an animal, can "encode" a lot of intelligence, easing up on the computational demands of the brain proper.
Our brain is more like a MoE model activating only a few neurons for specific activities making it more efficient unlike a dense model activating all the params.
Also brain produces quality tokens @ 3.3 tps instead of fast generating hallucinated tokens by certain models. Thus MTP can produce low quality tokens at 2x speed.
The claim that tok/s independent of quality is a useful comparison (I can get thousands of tok/s on a suitable small model), and secondarily that humans can’t output “tokens” faster than than in some sense, which I am less confident about
Based on a human output rate of 3.3 tok/s, which seems questionable as a means of comparison