The ‘big-sounding’ claim you quoted makes more sense only with the preceding context you omitted:
Conclusion: The brain is a million times slower than digital computers, but its slow speed is probably efficient for its given energy budget, as it allows for a full utilization of an enormous memory capacity and memory bandwidth. As a consequence of being very slow, brains are enormously circuit cycle efficient. Thus even some hypothetical superintelligence, running on non-exotic hardware, will not be able to think much faster than an artificial brain running on equivalent hardware at the same clock rate.
Because of its slow speed, the brain is super-optimized for intelligence per clock cycle. So digital superintelligences can think much faster, but to the extent they do so they are constrained to be brain-like in design (ultra optimized for low circuit depth). I have a decade old post analyzing/predicting this here, and today we have things like GPT4 which imitate the brain but run 1000x to 10000x times faster during training, and thus accel at writing.
The ‘big-sounding’ claim you quoted makes more sense only with the preceding context you omitted:
Because of its slow speed, the brain is super-optimized for intelligence per clock cycle. So digital superintelligences can think much faster, but to the extent they do so they are constrained to be brain-like in design (ultra optimized for low circuit depth). I have a decade old post analyzing/predicting this here, and today we have things like GPT4 which imitate the brain but run 1000x to 10000x times faster during training, and thus accel at writing.