6 ms·

Since a human uses ~100W of power, the .24Watt-hours of energy for an AI prompt is about 40human-seconds [Edit: 9human-seconds] of energy. And unlike the human

by sxp 1y ago

Since a human uses ~100W of power, the .24Watt-hours of energy for an AI prompt is about 40human-seconds [Edit: 9human-seconds] of energy. And unlike the human who spent multiple hours writing that article, an LLM would have linked to the original study: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_environmental_impact_of_delivering_ai_at_google_scale.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi... [ETA] Extending on these numbers a bit, a mean human uses 1.25KW of power (Kardashev Level .7 / 8 Gigahumans) and the mean American uses ~8KW of power according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co.... So if we align AIs to be eco-friendly, they will definitely murder all humans for the sake of the planet /s

IAmBroom 1y ago
Consider this your second upvote from me, for the second paragraph.
Octoth0rpe 1y ago
> an LLM would have linked to the original study There is a non-trivial chance that the LLM would've added a link to _something_, but links/references seem like a very common thing to hallucinate, no?
- PhantomHour 1y ago
  The way around that is that is for LLM-based tools to run a regular search engine query in the background and feed the results of that in alongside the prompt. (Usually a two-step process of the LLM formulating the query, then another pass on the results) The used results can then have their link either added to the end result separately, guaranteeing it is correct, or added to the prompt and "telling the LLM to include it", which retains a risk of hallucination, yes. Common to both of these is the failure mode that the LLM can still hallucinate whilst "summarizing" the results, meaning you still have no guarantee that the claims made actually show up in the results.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    >The way around that is that is for LLM-based tools to run a regular search engine query in the background and feed the results of that in alongside the prompt. Hardly better, as soon those "search engine results" would be AI slop themselves, including actual published papers (phoned-in by using AI, and "peer reviewed" by using AI from indifferent reviewers)
  - butbuttbutbut 1y ago
    The only thing that can solve the misinformation from a bad LLM is the misinformation from a good LLM... with a gun.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    > The way around that is that is for LLM-based tools to run a regular search engine query in the background and feed the results of that in alongside the prompt. (Usually a two-step process of the LLM formulating the query, then another pass on the results) Would the LLM-based tool be able to determine that the top results are just SEO-spam sites and move lower in the list, or just accept the spam results as gospel?
    - PhantomHour 1y ago
      This is an extremely tricky question. The practical and readily-observable-from-output answer is "No, they cannot meaningfully identify spam or misinformation, and do indeed just accept the results as gospel"; Google's AI summary works this way and is repeatedly wrong in exactly this way. Google's repeatedly had it be wrong even in the adcopy. The theoretical mechanism is that the attention mechanism with LLMs would be able to select which parts of the results are fed further into the results. This is how the model is capable of finding parts of the text that are "relevant". The problem is that this just isn't enough to robustly identify spam or incorrect information. However, we can isolate this "find the relevant bit" functionality away from the rest of the LLM to enhance regular search engines. It's hard to say how useful this is; Google has intentionally damaged their search engine and it may simply not be worth the GPU cycles compared to traditional approaches, but it's an idea being widely explored right now.
- loa_in_ 1y ago
  This used to be a problem but it's been unheard of for a while
  - seattle_spring 1y ago
    Definitely not unheard of. Claude gives broken links to documentation at least once a week.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    Happens frequently still with GTP 4o (and now 5) and Claude. Makes up "biographies" unrelated to the actual people, gives me bullshit non-existing API options and cli flags, etc.
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
      People say this, but then never link to chats. And then on the rare occasion they do link to a chat, their prompt is something like: "Tell about a person of history who was important for their work inthe time of their existence and give quotes of what they said that made them important when they were speaking include notes and other stories about them and give details about their life who they married and their kids and who their parents were and other big things they did do in their lives" Instead of downvotes, please prove me wrong.
      - gbin 1y ago
        It feels so common actually that I would not even bother sharing them. ChatGPT gives me hallucinated URLs all... the... time. Like several times a day. You can fix it by prompting it to Google the subject or research it otherwise it just vomits garbage.
        danielbln 1y ago
        LLMs are not databases, they are text processors that need to be trained on ungodly amounts of data and can sort of kind of double as a database, though a very fallible one. Inject ground truth and you're cooking; don't and it's a crap shoot. (not saying anything new here, but it bears repeating).
foofoo55 1y ago
> Since a human uses ~100W of power, the .24Watt-hours of energy > for an AI prompt is about 40human-seconds of energy. .24 Watt-hours is 864 Watts for one second, so a 100W human takes ~9 seconds for that output.
- OneLeggedCat 1y ago
  Perhaps sxp used an LLM to do his calculation.
- sxp 1y ago
  You're right. It's clear I should have had an LLM write my comment rather than do it myself before a cup of coffee. I've already spent an order of magnitude more energy thinking about this article compared to an LLM. Also, since I live a first-world life style which consumes multiple KW of power, I've probably consumed multiple orders of magnitude energy more than an LLM on this topic.
coldtea 1y ago
>And unlike the human who spent multiple hours writing that article, an LLM would have linked to the original study Or made up a fake citation, complete with fake or unrelated author names, on the spot
- zja 1y ago
  Seconded, I’ve yet to use an LLM that can consistently provide sources that back up what it’s telling me.
  - dismalaf 1y ago
    The Gemini app is pretty good at giving sources.
    - rhines 1y ago
      Experienced that today with 2.5 Pro. Though I was amused that all the links were links to Google searches for the source, rather than direct links.
      - dismalaf 1y ago
        In my chats with 2.5 Flash it gives me the direct sources lol. Also not going to lie, I've found 2.5 Flash generally gets straight to the point with sources a lot quicker than Pro. To the point I don't really use Pro. Edit - just used Pro, gave me a direct source. Who knows...
  - ur-whale 1y ago
    > I’ve yet to use an LLM that can consistently provide sources that back up what it’s telling me. Mmmh, that would have been my take as well up to around end of Q1 2025. Theses days, the flagship LLM's have reduced hallucination by quite a bit, and are also way better at citing sources (you sometimes have to nudge them). ChatGPT 5 has been very decent on that particular axis.
Workaccount2 1y ago
>And unlike the human who spent multiple hours writing that article, an LLM would have linked to the original study: This is why journalists are nearly universally hostile towards AI.
- Spivak 1y ago
  Press wire to blogspam as a service! There goes 90% of the "content" on news sites that seem to pride themselves on stretching out a sentence of info into 4 paragraphs. I love good journalism because it's adhd crack; in-depth spilling the tea but you have to really dig deep to find it nowadays.
recursive 1y ago
Did you use an LLM to do that arithmetic?
gdbsjjdn 1y ago
Attempts to reduce human experience down to a single number always seem so wrong-headed. A common one is when articles say "billions of dollars of productivity wasted to X". As if you can just replace any human activity for any human activity at any time and get the same results. I know companies would like to imagine that every employee is a fungible cog, but it seems pretty dismal as a world view.
_Algernon_ 1y ago
Unless you're arguing that people should kill themselves to save their 100W of power, the future energy use of every alive human is already committed and doesn't matter. Not to mention that the energy should also include all the extra energy spent on making converting energy into a form that is usable by humans (ie. food). There is probably at least an order of magnitude.
saltcured 1y ago
Great, now consider the human's marginal power consumption for a task instead of their baseline consumption. Unless your point is that we can kill a bunch of humans to save energy...?
- catlikesshrimp 1y ago
  Prompt: what will the best phone be in 2025? Wasted 0.24w/h and 5 drops of water.
catlikesshrimp 1y ago
I bet the human had LLM help. I bet it didn't take hours to put together.
oulipo2 1y ago
The issue is that now we're over-utilizing prompts everywhere. Every search engine query. Every keypress in an AI editor. Every new website makes queries in the back. Analyze emails. etc So it's not just about "the one query you ask ChatGPT about what you should write your mum to say you're not coming for Thanksgiving" It's rather that an AI query is 0.24Wh, but that we are now using thousands of those per users per days, and that we globalize it at the scale of the planet, so 7 billion users... and this becomes huge
trostaft 1y ago
Thanks, I was scouring the article looking for the original study, could not believe that they didn't have it linked.

by sxp 1y ago

IAmBroom 1y ago

Consider this your second upvote from me, for the second paragraph.

Octoth0rpe 1y ago

> an LLM would have linked to the original study There is a non-trivial chance that the LLM would've added a link to _something_, but links/references seem like a very common thing to hallucinate, no?

PhantomHour 1y ago
The way around that is that is for LLM-based tools to run a regular search engine query in the background and feed the results of that in alongside the prompt. (Usually a two-step process of the LLM formulating the query, then another pass on the results) The used results can then have their link either added to the end result separately, guaranteeing it is correct, or added to the prompt and "telling the LLM to include it", which retains a risk of hallucination, yes. Common to both of these is the failure mode that the LLM can still hallucinate whilst "summarizing" the results, meaning you still have no guarantee that the claims made actually show up in the results.
- coldtea 1y ago
  >The way around that is that is for LLM-based tools to run a regular search engine query in the background and feed the results of that in alongside the prompt. Hardly better, as soon those "search engine results" would be AI slop themselves, including actual published papers (phoned-in by using AI, and "peer reviewed" by using AI from indifferent reviewers)
- butbuttbutbut 1y ago
  The only thing that can solve the misinformation from a bad LLM is the misinformation from a good LLM... with a gun.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > The way around that is that is for LLM-based tools to run a regular search engine query in the background and feed the results of that in alongside the prompt. (Usually a two-step process of the LLM formulating the query, then another pass on the results) Would the LLM-based tool be able to determine that the top results are just SEO-spam sites and move lower in the list, or just accept the spam results as gospel?
  - PhantomHour 1y ago
    This is an extremely tricky question. The practical and readily-observable-from-output answer is "No, they cannot meaningfully identify spam or misinformation, and do indeed just accept the results as gospel"; Google's AI summary works this way and is repeatedly wrong in exactly this way. Google's repeatedly had it be wrong even in the adcopy. The theoretical mechanism is that the attention mechanism with LLMs would be able to select which parts of the results are fed further into the results. This is how the model is capable of finding parts of the text that are "relevant". The problem is that this just isn't enough to robustly identify spam or incorrect information. However, we can isolate this "find the relevant bit" functionality away from the rest of the LLM to enhance regular search engines. It's hard to say how useful this is; Google has intentionally damaged their search engine and it may simply not be worth the GPU cycles compared to traditional approaches, but it's an idea being widely explored right now.
loa_in_ 1y ago
This used to be a problem but it's been unheard of for a while
- seattle_spring 1y ago
  Definitely not unheard of. Claude gives broken links to documentation at least once a week.
- coldtea 1y ago
  Happens frequently still with GTP 4o (and now 5) and Claude. Makes up "biographies" unrelated to the actual people, gives me bullshit non-existing API options and cli flags, etc.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    People say this, but then never link to chats. And then on the rare occasion they do link to a chat, their prompt is something like: "Tell about a person of history who was important for their work inthe time of their existence and give quotes of what they said that made them important when they were speaking include notes and other stories about them and give details about their life who they married and their kids and who their parents were and other big things they did do in their lives" Instead of downvotes, please prove me wrong.
    - gbin 1y ago
      It feels so common actually that I would not even bother sharing them. ChatGPT gives me hallucinated URLs all... the... time. Like several times a day. You can fix it by prompting it to Google the subject or research it otherwise it just vomits garbage.
      - danielbln 1y ago
        LLMs are not databases, they are text processors that need to be trained on ungodly amounts of data and can sort of kind of double as a database, though a very fallible one. Inject ground truth and you're cooking; don't and it's a crap shoot. (not saying anything new here, but it bears repeating).

foofoo55 1y ago

> Since a human uses ~100W of power, the .24Watt-hours of energy > for an AI prompt is about 40human-seconds of energy. .24 Watt-hours is 864 Watts for one second, so a 100W human takes ~9 seconds for that output.

OneLeggedCat 1y ago
Perhaps sxp used an LLM to do his calculation.
sxp 1y ago
You're right. It's clear I should have had an LLM write my comment rather than do it myself before a cup of coffee. I've already spent an order of magnitude more energy thinking about this article compared to an LLM. Also, since I live a first-world life style which consumes multiple KW of power, I've probably consumed multiple orders of magnitude energy more than an LLM on this topic.

coldtea 1y ago

>And unlike the human who spent multiple hours writing that article, an LLM would have linked to the original study Or made up a fake citation, complete with fake or unrelated author names, on the spot

zja 1y ago
Seconded, I’ve yet to use an LLM that can consistently provide sources that back up what it’s telling me.
- dismalaf 1y ago
  The Gemini app is pretty good at giving sources.
  - rhines 1y ago
    Experienced that today with 2.5 Pro. Though I was amused that all the links were links to Google searches for the source, rather than direct links.
    - dismalaf 1y ago
      In my chats with 2.5 Flash it gives me the direct sources lol. Also not going to lie, I've found 2.5 Flash generally gets straight to the point with sources a lot quicker than Pro. To the point I don't really use Pro. Edit - just used Pro, gave me a direct source. Who knows...
- ur-whale 1y ago
  > I’ve yet to use an LLM that can consistently provide sources that back up what it’s telling me. Mmmh, that would have been my take as well up to around end of Q1 2025. Theses days, the flagship LLM's have reduced hallucination by quite a bit, and are also way better at citing sources (you sometimes have to nudge them). ChatGPT 5 has been very decent on that particular axis.

Workaccount2 1y ago

>And unlike the human who spent multiple hours writing that article, an LLM would have linked to the original study: This is why journalists are nearly universally hostile towards AI.

Spivak 1y ago
Press wire to blogspam as a service! There goes 90% of the "content" on news sites that seem to pride themselves on stretching out a sentence of info into 4 paragraphs. I love good journalism because it's adhd crack; in-depth spilling the tea but you have to really dig deep to find it nowadays.

recursive 1y ago

Did you use an LLM to do that arithmetic?

gdbsjjdn 1y ago

Attempts to reduce human experience down to a single number always seem so wrong-headed. A common one is when articles say "billions of dollars of productivity wasted to X". As if you can just replace any human activity for any human activity at any time and get the same results. I know companies would like to imagine that every employee is a fungible cog, but it seems pretty dismal as a world view.

_Algernon_ 1y ago

Unless you're arguing that people should kill themselves to save their 100W of power, the future energy use of every alive human is already committed and doesn't matter. Not to mention that the energy should also include all the extra energy spent on making converting energy into a form that is usable by humans (ie. food). There is probably at least an order of magnitude.

saltcured 1y ago

Great, now consider the human's marginal power consumption for a task instead of their baseline consumption. Unless your point is that we can kill a bunch of humans to save energy...?

catlikesshrimp 1y ago
Prompt: what will the best phone be in 2025? Wasted 0.24w/h and 5 drops of water.

catlikesshrimp 1y ago

I bet the human had LLM help. I bet it didn't take hours to put together.

oulipo2 1y ago

The issue is that now we're over-utilizing prompts everywhere. Every search engine query. Every keypress in an AI editor. Every new website makes queries in the back. Analyze emails. etc So it's not just about "the one query you ask ChatGPT about what you should write your mum to say you're not coming for Thanksgiving" It's rather that an AI query is 0.24Wh, but that we are now using thousands of those per users per days, and that we globalize it at the scale of the planet, so 7 billion users... and this becomes huge

trostaft 1y ago

Thanks, I was scouring the article looking for the original study, could not believe that they didn't have it linked.