> I've read somewhere that half of googles datacenter energy consumption is ai I can't find that figure, or what's being included in it: major Google products

> I've read somewhere that half of googles datacenter energy consumption is ai I can't find that figure, or what's being included in it: major Google products like Search and Translate are AI (since at least ~2018, depending on your definition of AI) and have huge numbers of users - I think it'd be hard to deny their utility. > Its not just about one query [...] To be clear, I didn't calculate that "one query" was equivalent to a cup of coffee - it was a year's worth of someone's LLM usage. > Also, there's that pesky training that is hugely expensive on electricity. I don't believe the coffee comparison took into consideration the one-off costs either, like manufacturing of your coffee machine, but let's consider the amortized emissions of training anyway: 500 tons of CO2[0] over 200,000,000 users[1] means 0.0025kg of CO2 per user, barely shifting from the figure of inference alone. Again, rough calculation - would be lower per-user if taking into account API/3rd-party users, but then higher taking into account more model versions. Realistically, I don't think someone's CO2 emissions on the order of 0.4kg, whether that's coffee, video streaming/rendering, LLM usage, or so on, should take so much of the focus while we have, for instance, celebrities emitting 8,000,000kg a year[2] from private jets. [0]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ai-internet-carbon-footprint/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ai-internet-carbon-fo... [1]: https://a16z.com/how-are-consumers-using-generative-ai/ https://a16z.com/how-are-consumers-using-generative-ai/ [2]: https://i.imgur.com/EP0Gbtk.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/EP0Gbtk.jpeg