5 ms·
It all highly depends on what you're doing. For image generation, AI is quite cheap. Here's an estimation: Video card uses 200W for around 8-10 seconds to gene
by dale_glass 3y ago
It all highly depends on what you're doing. For image generation, AI is quite cheap.
Here's an estimation: Video card uses 200W for around 8-10 seconds to generate an image. Let's say 10. That's 6 images/minute, 360 images/hour, 1800 images per kwh.
At 0.20 Euro/kwh in Europe (so not really cheap), an image costs 0.00011 Euro to generate.
Let's say we're further doing a boring brute force approach of choosing the best image out of 100. This puts our costs at 1 cent per final image.
This IMO compares extremely favorably to almost all alternatives. Drawing by hand for hours, using paints or inks, using good paper, etc, will easily cost more than 1 cent per picture.
And AI can be done purely on renewables, while inks, paints and paper have ecological costs.
- kevmo314 3y agoInduced demand though. I've never painted but I sure have generated a bunch of images.
- sandspar 3y agoCulture has been trending visual for a while. There's been growing demand, this is just a cheaper supply.
- xnx 3y agoComparison is the key part. What were people doing with their time and money before they were generating images? Sitting quietly in nature? Hiring illustrators and photographers?
- Palomides 3y agoit's a bit questionable to claim that AI can be done purely on renewables but painting can't, I think you're forgetting costs (of production, and of eco-friendly disposal (hah!)) embodied in the computing hardware
- dale_glass 3y agoAt 360 images/hour, you can generate 8640 images/day, 3153600/year. Realistically, no reason why the card shouldn't last at least 3 years, so that brings us to at least 10 million pictures. Anecdotally, 10K sheets of paper per tree, so almost a thousand trees worth in just paper, before accounting for the other materials, the impacts of their extraction and logging and so on. I think hardware wins there as well, and the more tech advances the more uneven it gets. Making paper and pigments is a purely physical thing, we're already about as good at that as we can be. And probably getting worse with time, as the most convenient mines of materials are exhausted.
- vb-8448 3y agoIf you want to do the math, do it right. How many images are you going to draw by hand in a year? For sure not 3153600 ... When speaking about environmental impact, absolute values count, not relative ones!
- latchkey 3y ago> Realistically, no reason why the card shouldn't last at least 3 years If you have 10k H100s, the failure rate is about 3-5/day. In numbers, that is $90-150k/day or ~11%/year (3*365=1095) on the low end. Of course a lot of these cards can go off for RMA and come back to life eventually, but this is being actually realistic about it. You end up having to manage a whole RMA program and it is a constant stream of cards in and out.
- dale_glass 3y agoWhy would you need 10K H100s for image generation? That sounds more like a training setup
- latchkey 3y agoOh, I see. So what you use the GPU for matters with the durability of it.