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"25,000 average-sized households per day" For 20 million users? Great, you just proved that AI energy impact is not big. Like a fraction of 20 million users ov

"25,000 average-sized households per day" For 20 million users? Great, you just proved that AI energy impact is not big. Like a fraction of 20 million users over-using AC like it happens, for instance, in the US. Or flying for work continuously without a good reason, also super common, and incredibly more wasteful (~30h flight time of a 737 is like the energy needed for a training, not inference, of a model with 100s of billions parameters). The point about AI and energy does not make sense, it exists only because there are people that are worried about AI, and need to find something to show it creates damage. You can install Flux in your fucking laptop and generate images there, and you'll see that to make it as hot (or discharge as quickly) as when you play any modern videogame, it takes a lot of efforts and generated images. And you are running on a battery... Want to talk about all these stupid Javascript frameworks, that make loading a trivial page so wasteful, energy-wise? Almost everything is worse than AI, basically. The fact that this post is upvoted here on HN, where once there was more critical thinking, is testament on how bad nowadays we are doing.

qrsjutsu 2y ago
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amelius 2y ago
> > "25,000 average-sized households per day" > For 20 million users? But during how many hours are these users active?
- antirez 2y ago
  Enough for them to accumulate the work of an incredible amount of persons-hours of graphic design. Is this not ok, and instead to have a 500 watts/h TV on all day is fine? Or having no public transportation whatsoever and move every day a 2000 kilogram vehicle with yourself inside back and forth from point A to point B? With incredible amounts of wasted energy?
  - apetrov 2y ago
    Unfortunately, some people just love to count their neighbor’s expenses instead of minding their own business.
    - bumby 2y ago
      Are you claiming externalities are unimportant?
      - apetrov 2y ago
        Yes, especially when effect is marginal like in this case.
        bumby 2y ago
        You seem to be missing the collective action aspect. You’re saying the equivalent of “it doesn’t matter if I dump my car oil in the river, because it’s a negligible impact on the environment.” It can be marginal at the individual level but very important if it scales to the societal level.
        apetrov 2y ago
        You're mixing two things together: * something that's illegal (dumping used oil into a river) * and something that's perfectly legal (buying oil) You buy electricity and it's yours to decide how to use it. i.e. heat up your house or mine crypto.
        bumby 2y ago
        That's a fair critique of a bad analogy. But it still misses the point of the collective action problem. Consider a different analogy: you are free to burn as much fuel as you want, and individually it doesn't make much difference. But if everyone collectively takes that same stance, it leads to large negative externalities. IMO the extreme libertarian view works fine for small groups but does not do a good job of managing collective action problems in large societies when the scope exceeds our psychological bandwidth.
bumby 2y ago
Try putting it in a different context because I think you are weighing both “AI” and “household operation” the same. For the use case you mentioned (image generation) what do you think has a bigger impact on someone’s quality of life: 1) operating a home or 2) generating AI images? I would argue most people would weigh the convenience of a house a lot higher. That doesn’t mean AI is a net negative, just that it’s important to frame the problem that focuses on what matters most to people (quality of life).
- amanda99 2y ago
  What does "operating a home" mean to you? Boiling water in the evening for tea (most people will fill the kettle up)? 100 Wh = 50 prompts? Which one's more important?
  - bumby 2y ago
    For me? The tea. To my point above, it adds a lot more to my quality of life. For someone else, it may be completely different. I’m not saying one has to be valued over the other, just that the issue should be framed more appropriately. (Your numbers would also not be accurate for me. I warm tea in a microwave, so it’s closer to 15 W-hr)
    - visarga 2y ago
      For other people AI is a tool for education, as it can explain concepts, is never tired and doesn't get bored. What is more important, a cup of tea or understanding that one thing you never had time for.
      - bumby 2y ago
        Are we really going to go down this road of bad-faith arguing? I could easily say “what’s more important, a learning a hobby or having shelter and food?” (Besides, this goes against the HN guidelines of assuming the strongest position of the comment). My point is not to claim one value system over another, but to frame the problem in a more appropriate light. I think, even taking your bad-faith stance above, it is still framed as “what adds more to one’s quality of life?”
zwolf24 2y ago
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ceh123 2y ago
To add some extra numbers here just to showcase how little energy usage this is. This means it's adding about 0.012% additional energy consumption to those users energy consumption. From another angle: Average US house energy consumption is around 30kWh per day. 0.012% of that is 3.75 watt hours of energy per day. This is the equivalent amount of energy as streaming HD video to your iPhone on a 4G network for 1.5 seconds. [0] So in other words, a 15s youtube ad you are forced to watch on your phone before watching the video you were going to watch anyway takes an order of magnitude more energy than the average AI user according to this article. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109623/electricity-consumption-video-streaming-by-device-globally/?__sso_cookie_checker=failed https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109623/electricity-cons...
- bumby 2y ago
  Help me understand. The article claims 20MM users with an average of 24 prompts per day. Do we have any information on the average number of prompts per user? I suspect it would follow a Pareto distribution, with a small subset consuming much much more, but no clue as to where that average assumption holds. Edit: a quick search points to 5-10 prompts per session but we’d still need to know the average number of sessions
  - visarga 2y ago
    Yes, I searched this too. There probably are many single round sessions, but the average length is 8-12 messages.
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    In December I did 61 images, and in November I did 121, according to Replicate's billing. Probably more like 10-20 images per session, which for me are usually 1-2 times per week?
qwerty_clicks 2y ago
This article only discusses image generation, a small subset of AI use cases. As users, governments, corporations, and background processes grow to consume AI all day the water and power issues will grow the same. Whether AI or JavaScript, action is needed ahead of shareholder value.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  What water issues?
  - descendant 2y ago
    Maybe they mean the water cooling systems used in the data centers. As far as I remember, it was a closed system so I don't know if that's significant.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      Of course they're a closed system. Why wouldn't they be?
FollowingTheDao 2y ago
> For 20 million users? Great, you just proved that AI energy impact is not big. You missed that this was just a calculation of Midjourney power use, and you missed the next paragraph: "Keep in mind that our example only touches image generation services. Let's not forget about other AI services like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Deepseek—and all their versions and variations. The list, and energy waste, continues to grow." > Almost everything is worse than AI, basically. I am glad you brough this up. AI just adds to it all.
greentxt 2y ago
I 100% gaurantee you don't recycle. Perfect, enemy the good. That said, couldn't agree moreabout air travel or travel in general; a monument to man's self endulgent waste.
_heimdall 2y ago
Is it not still better to just avoid using all this energy though? Do we really need to have these LLM tools everywhere? And more importantly, when do we stop justifying the use of one finite resource by pointing to all the other ways we could reduce use but don't? Just because people waste a bunch of energy, water, wood, etc doesn't justify using it however you want, at least in my opinion.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  I'll give a shit about AI energy usage when a huge swath of the population isn't needlessly forced to drive to work every day.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    And that's why we'll never solve any meaningful societal issues. If you can use less energy, or water, or plastic, or time, just do it. Who the hell cares what everyone else chooses to do?
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      I already am. I'm not concerned about a 0.001% increase of my footprint. There are bigger fish to fry. This is fear mongering.
      - Spivak 2y ago
        Yeah, the real point is that "AI uses a lot of energy: here's why you should be concerned" is just a post-hoc justification for someone who doesn't like AI and needs something to point to.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        Agreed, that's not a useful argument when its posed that way. That is only one way of seeing it though. The question, in my opinion, isn't whether LLMs are a huge energy suck and we should be worked. My question is whether its really needed at all, regardless of how much energy it may or may not use relative to other things. People's needs really are pretty simple at the end of the day. Food, water, shelter, (the feeling of) safety, community. We just aren't good at defining enough and some people are very good at convincing us that we don't need to even consider that concept.
phyzome 2y ago
Your numbers aside, how do you explain the prevailing "we need to build more power plants for AI" sentiment in some circles? Surely that indicates a significant carbon footprint. (Especially when you consider how many are looking to coal and gas.)
bko 2y ago
> Almost everything is worse than AI, basically. I am apt to agree but I reject this whole argument completely. This is just part of a de-growth agenda where every action is looked at through the lens of scarcity. Sometimes its environment, other times its equity, but it always leads to extinguishing human flourishing. Examples: - Having babies is bad because it increases the carbon footprint - Having babies is bad because world is over-populated - Giving advantages to your children is bad because other's aren't as advantaged - Why invest in rockets when people are starving in [country] - Honors classes are bad because the distribution of the participants is not proportional to the population It's all just so exhausting and at this point I refuse to engage with it at any level. There is no winning.
- OKRainbowKid 2y ago
  I don't see how discussions about how to better distribute limited resources go against "human flourishing". The opposite, actually.
  - pieix 2y ago
    The solution is to grow our way out of it — make more energy, make cleaner energy, develop new technologies — rather than browbeat people into submission with moral arguments because you don't like how they've chosen to deploy their resources.
anal_reactor 2y ago
> For 20 million users So basically, if we want to help the environment, we should replace people with AI
GTP 2y ago
Honest question. I remeber some recent news about Microsoft considering to bring back in use an "old" nuclear power plant to cover their (maybe projected?) cloud power consuption due to AI. If AI's power consumption is negligible and less than a short YouTube ad anyway, why the need to bring back to operation a nuclear power plant?
- Ukv 2y ago
  An individual user's model usage is negligible, in that you should not feel bad about querying an LLM unless you feel approximately 1000 times worse about drinking a cup of coffee. But Google/Microsoft provide services for hundreds of millions, or even billions, of users. In the same way, if your service was hairdryers (owing to progress in hot-air-over-IP) and you had 300 million users, you'd need 300 million * 2000W * 10 minutes = 100000MWh daily, or about 5 copies of the nuclear power plant the Microsoft are opening. You could look at it as those hairdryer power plants already effectively existing, just distributed as a small portion of many plants.
  - GTP 2y ago
    Yes, I get that it is an issue of scale, but that's the issue in the end. A commenter rightfully pointed out that there's no point in giving examples of other things that consume the same or more if at the end of the day we don't take action on those anyway. Another commenter, equally rightly, answered that the utility of these things are subjective, and this changes what we feel we should take action on. I still have to find a clear position on this.
jdietrich 2y ago
Also, there's immense variation in the carbon intensity of electricity generation - an order of magnitude difference between Australia and France. How much electricity we use matters far less than how we're making that electricity. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

qrsjutsu 2y ago

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amelius 2y ago

> > "25,000 average-sized households per day" > For 20 million users? But during how many hours are these users active?

antirez 2y ago
Enough for them to accumulate the work of an incredible amount of persons-hours of graphic design. Is this not ok, and instead to have a 500 watts/h TV on all day is fine? Or having no public transportation whatsoever and move every day a 2000 kilogram vehicle with yourself inside back and forth from point A to point B? With incredible amounts of wasted energy?
- apetrov 2y ago
  Unfortunately, some people just love to count their neighbor’s expenses instead of minding their own business.
  - bumby 2y ago
    Are you claiming externalities are unimportant?
    - apetrov 2y ago
      Yes, especially when effect is marginal like in this case.
      - bumby 2y ago
        You seem to be missing the collective action aspect. You’re saying the equivalent of “it doesn’t matter if I dump my car oil in the river, because it’s a negligible impact on the environment.” It can be marginal at the individual level but very important if it scales to the societal level.
        apetrov 2y ago
        You're mixing two things together: * something that's illegal (dumping used oil into a river) * and something that's perfectly legal (buying oil) You buy electricity and it's yours to decide how to use it. i.e. heat up your house or mine crypto.
        bumby 2y ago
        That's a fair critique of a bad analogy. But it still misses the point of the collective action problem. Consider a different analogy: you are free to burn as much fuel as you want, and individually it doesn't make much difference. But if everyone collectively takes that same stance, it leads to large negative externalities. IMO the extreme libertarian view works fine for small groups but does not do a good job of managing collective action problems in large societies when the scope exceeds our psychological bandwidth.

bumby 2y ago

Try putting it in a different context because I think you are weighing both “AI” and “household operation” the same. For the use case you mentioned (image generation) what do you think has a bigger impact on someone’s quality of life: 1) operating a home or 2) generating AI images? I would argue most people would weigh the convenience of a house a lot higher. That doesn’t mean AI is a net negative, just that it’s important to frame the problem that focuses on what matters most to people (quality of life).

amanda99 2y ago
What does "operating a home" mean to you? Boiling water in the evening for tea (most people will fill the kettle up)? 100 Wh = 50 prompts? Which one's more important?
- bumby 2y ago
  For me? The tea. To my point above, it adds a lot more to my quality of life. For someone else, it may be completely different. I’m not saying one has to be valued over the other, just that the issue should be framed more appropriately. (Your numbers would also not be accurate for me. I warm tea in a microwave, so it’s closer to 15 W-hr)
  - visarga 2y ago
    For other people AI is a tool for education, as it can explain concepts, is never tired and doesn't get bored. What is more important, a cup of tea or understanding that one thing you never had time for.
    - bumby 2y ago
      Are we really going to go down this road of bad-faith arguing? I could easily say “what’s more important, a learning a hobby or having shelter and food?” (Besides, this goes against the HN guidelines of assuming the strongest position of the comment). My point is not to claim one value system over another, but to frame the problem in a more appropriate light. I think, even taking your bad-faith stance above, it is still framed as “what adds more to one’s quality of life?”

zwolf24 2y ago

[dead]

ceh123 2y ago

To add some extra numbers here just to showcase how little energy usage this is. This means it's adding about 0.012% additional energy consumption to those users energy consumption. From another angle: Average US house energy consumption is around 30kWh per day. 0.012% of that is 3.75 watt hours of energy per day. This is the equivalent amount of energy as streaming HD video to your iPhone on a 4G network for 1.5 seconds. [0] So in other words, a 15s youtube ad you are forced to watch on your phone before watching the video you were going to watch anyway takes an order of magnitude more energy than the average AI user according to this article. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109623/electricity-consumption-video-streaming-by-device-globally/?__sso_cookie_checker=failed https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109623/electricity-cons...

bumby 2y ago
Help me understand. The article claims 20MM users with an average of 24 prompts per day. Do we have any information on the average number of prompts per user? I suspect it would follow a Pareto distribution, with a small subset consuming much much more, but no clue as to where that average assumption holds. Edit: a quick search points to 5-10 prompts per session but we’d still need to know the average number of sessions
- visarga 2y ago
  Yes, I searched this too. There probably are many single round sessions, but the average length is 8-12 messages.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  In December I did 61 images, and in November I did 121, according to Replicate's billing. Probably more like 10-20 images per session, which for me are usually 1-2 times per week?

qwerty_clicks 2y ago

This article only discusses image generation, a small subset of AI use cases. As users, governments, corporations, and background processes grow to consume AI all day the water and power issues will grow the same. Whether AI or JavaScript, action is needed ahead of shareholder value.

bongodongobob 2y ago
What water issues?
- descendant 2y ago
  Maybe they mean the water cooling systems used in the data centers. As far as I remember, it was a closed system so I don't know if that's significant.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    Of course they're a closed system. Why wouldn't they be?

FollowingTheDao 2y ago

> For 20 million users? Great, you just proved that AI energy impact is not big. You missed that this was just a calculation of Midjourney power use, and you missed the next paragraph: "Keep in mind that our example only touches image generation services. Let's not forget about other AI services like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Deepseek—and all their versions and variations. The list, and energy waste, continues to grow." > Almost everything is worse than AI, basically. I am glad you brough this up. AI just adds to it all.

greentxt 2y ago

I 100% gaurantee you don't recycle. Perfect, enemy the good. That said, couldn't agree moreabout air travel or travel in general; a monument to man's self endulgent waste.

_heimdall 2y ago

Is it not still better to just avoid using all this energy though? Do we really need to have these LLM tools everywhere? And more importantly, when do we stop justifying the use of one finite resource by pointing to all the other ways we could reduce use but don't? Just because people waste a bunch of energy, water, wood, etc doesn't justify using it however you want, at least in my opinion.

bongodongobob 2y ago
I'll give a shit about AI energy usage when a huge swath of the population isn't needlessly forced to drive to work every day.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  And that's why we'll never solve any meaningful societal issues. If you can use less energy, or water, or plastic, or time, just do it. Who the hell cares what everyone else chooses to do?
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    I already am. I'm not concerned about a 0.001% increase of my footprint. There are bigger fish to fry. This is fear mongering.
    - Spivak 2y ago
      Yeah, the real point is that "AI uses a lot of energy: here's why you should be concerned" is just a post-hoc justification for someone who doesn't like AI and needs something to point to.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        Agreed, that's not a useful argument when its posed that way. That is only one way of seeing it though. The question, in my opinion, isn't whether LLMs are a huge energy suck and we should be worked. My question is whether its really needed at all, regardless of how much energy it may or may not use relative to other things. People's needs really are pretty simple at the end of the day. Food, water, shelter, (the feeling of) safety, community. We just aren't good at defining enough and some people are very good at convincing us that we don't need to even consider that concept.

phyzome 2y ago

Your numbers aside, how do you explain the prevailing "we need to build more power plants for AI" sentiment in some circles? Surely that indicates a significant carbon footprint. (Especially when you consider how many are looking to coal and gas.)

bko 2y ago

> Almost everything is worse than AI, basically. I am apt to agree but I reject this whole argument completely. This is just part of a de-growth agenda where every action is looked at through the lens of scarcity. Sometimes its environment, other times its equity, but it always leads to extinguishing human flourishing. Examples: - Having babies is bad because it increases the carbon footprint - Having babies is bad because world is over-populated - Giving advantages to your children is bad because other's aren't as advantaged - Why invest in rockets when people are starving in [country] - Honors classes are bad because the distribution of the participants is not proportional to the population It's all just so exhausting and at this point I refuse to engage with it at any level. There is no winning.

OKRainbowKid 2y ago
I don't see how discussions about how to better distribute limited resources go against "human flourishing". The opposite, actually.
- pieix 2y ago
  The solution is to grow our way out of it — make more energy, make cleaner energy, develop new technologies — rather than browbeat people into submission with moral arguments because you don't like how they've chosen to deploy their resources.

anal_reactor 2y ago

> For 20 million users So basically, if we want to help the environment, we should replace people with AI

GTP 2y ago

Honest question. I remeber some recent news about Microsoft considering to bring back in use an "old" nuclear power plant to cover their (maybe projected?) cloud power consuption due to AI. If AI's power consumption is negligible and less than a short YouTube ad anyway, why the need to bring back to operation a nuclear power plant?

Ukv 2y ago
An individual user's model usage is negligible, in that you should not feel bad about querying an LLM unless you feel approximately 1000 times worse about drinking a cup of coffee. But Google/Microsoft provide services for hundreds of millions, or even billions, of users. In the same way, if your service was hairdryers (owing to progress in hot-air-over-IP) and you had 300 million users, you'd need 300 million * 2000W * 10 minutes = 100000MWh daily, or about 5 copies of the nuclear power plant the Microsoft are opening. You could look at it as those hairdryer power plants already effectively existing, just distributed as a small portion of many plants.
- GTP 2y ago
  Yes, I get that it is an issue of scale, but that's the issue in the end. A commenter rightfully pointed out that there's no point in giving examples of other things that consume the same or more if at the end of the day we don't take action on those anyway. Another commenter, equally rightly, answered that the utility of these things are subjective, and this changes what we feel we should take action on. I still have to find a clear position on this.

jdietrich 2y ago

Also, there's immense variation in the carbon intensity of electricity generation - an order of magnitude difference between Australia and France. How much electricity we use matters far less than how we're making that electricity. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...