Depending on how you count, the human brain is between 100 trillion and 1 quadrillion parameters, which is one guess as to why we're so much more sample efficient at learning than LLMs are.

Unless quantum effects do infact play a role in consciousness. It’s not clear they do by any means, but if it did that could shift the understanding of our own minds and consciousness drastically. Otherwise we are just a dense complex network we can reproduce with enough money.

I don't think you even need to go to speculative quantum stuff. A single biological neuron in isolation is a surprisingly complex system that resembles a small artificial neural net more than an artificial neuron in many ways. On top of an entire feedback system from diffusion of neurotransmitters which doesn't cleanly map to ANNs.

Trying to estimate equivalent "parameter size" of the brain when we only superficially understand behavior of individual neurons let alone how intelligence emerges from the connectome seems too speculative to be a particularly useful metric.

How many tokens does your brain input a day?

One key difference between humans and (current) LLMs is that we can actually judge the material we learn from at the time we're learning it, contextualize it and discard garbage when we spot it.

LLMs need an awful lot of handholding all the time, meanwhile humans get pretty good at it on their own.

Synapses and LLM parameters are not equivalent.

In Silicon Valley they are.

The extra parameters are useful for optimization. Deep-learning relies on highly singular solutions.