The full quote from 7:40 in the video: "I think it's kind of fascinating to me that when the state-of-the-art LLMs go down, it's actually kind of like an intelligence brownout in the world. It's kind of like when the voltage is unreliable in the grid, and the planet just gets dumber. The more reliance we have on these models, which already is really dramatic and I think will continue to grow."

I don't think his point was that LLMs are as crucial as the power grid, or even close. He's just saying that he finds the comparison interesting, for whatever reason. If you find it stupid instead, that's okay.

I'm just saying that the statement "when the state-of-the-art LLMs go down, it's actually kind of like an intelligence brownout in the world" is entirely false.

All analogies are false, but some are useful.