Womble

ok, but running a hairdryer for 5 minutes is well up into the hundreds of queries which is more than the vast majority of people will use in a week. The post I replied to was talking about it being 1-2% of energy usage, so that includes transport, heating and heavy industry. It just doesnt pass the smell test to me that something where a weeks worth of usage is exceeded by a person drying their hair once is comparable with such vast users of energy.

Do you have a source for that? Because given a chatgpt query takes a similar amount of energy to running a hair dryer for a few seconds i find it hard to believe.

Thank you for posting this, I’ve tried to say the same thing to people quite a few times but to roughly the same reaction as this post has got. Its an entirely emotional reaction, people have convinced themself that AI is bad (arguable) therefore anything bad said about them is true (incorrect).

Its an urban planning and transport issue essentially. Medium density housing (think 4-6 story blocks) allows enough people to live in an area that it becomes feasible to have trams/light rail serving that area.

You’re right that there’s orders of magnitude difference, but its the driving that’s far more! One query to a chatGPT type model uses roughly 1Wh of energy, which is about the same as is released in burning one droplet of gasoline.

No I’m a meat eater who is anti-car! I’m more getting at how people have latched on to the energy use of AI models without realising the huge energy usage that goes into their daily lives.

Yeah, I too hate those hypcrites who complain about the massive environmental impact of AI, then drive a 10 mile round trip to buy a burger made from a cow raised on soy.

Yep, and when you click a button that liteally says “make this discoverable on search engines” which is off by defualt, its the later.

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It would be nice to see a price/GWh of this (along with running costs, it says they save 1 Million per GWh, how much were the running costs before!?), but any improvement in battery tech is definitely a good thing.