4 ms·
Out of curiosity, how many Wh does an LLM burn to output something, and how many does a human for similar output? I wonder what's more energy-heavy.
by stavros 9mo ago
Out of curiosity, how many Wh does an LLM burn to output something, and how many does a human for similar output? I wonder what's more energy-heavy.
- kachapopopow 9mo agoburning a hole in your wallet? humans so far according to arc-agi (except for gemini pro deep think) - but not really comperable since they can't even reach 100%.
- stavros 9mo agoI'm talking about energy expenditure.
- fragmede 9mo agoHuman brains are far more energy efficient, if that's what you're asking.
- kingofmen 9mo agoFor some given task, perhaps; but the AI only consumes power while actively working. The human has to run 24/7 and also expends energy on useless organs like kidneys, gonads, hopes, and dreams.
- Legend2440 9mo agoIt's still not even close though. An entire human runs on somewhere around 100W. Life is remarkably energy efficient.
- stavros 9mo agoAn LLM takes twenty seconds to write a page. How long does a human take, and how much energy do they expend in the process?
- rplnt 9mo agoThat's kinda unfair until we have a device that can translate thoughts to writtrn text. Both from time and energy perspective. Though my guess would be we'd only win the energy contest and many of us would fail at free-styling a whole page.
- stavros 9mo agoWell, I'll accept dictating at the speed of speech, though you kind of have to take things as they are now (otherwise it's cheating, if your metric is "who is more energy efficient at writing a page?"). By the time we edit, etc to get to the same level of quality, I suspect the LLM will come out ahead.
- bcatanzaro 9mo agosadly, disembodied brains are not very useful. embodied brains require a civilization's worth of energy consumption and environmental impact in order to do their work. so we really need to take the world's power/water/carbon impact (divided by the world population) to talk about how much power it takes for a human brain to solve a problem.