Glad it has AI. AI has nothing on cars. Save a car trip a week even if electric is way more than 10k queries.
chatgpt use should be in the default set since energy use of ai is so often in the news now - and more often in social media
Does that use a lot of energy?
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Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#32I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy. That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of…
Your dismissal of moral concerns is not convincing.
Imagine a world where the only energy you do is use was generated by a stationary bike you had to ride yourself. You would, generally speaking, use that energy differently than energy you would pay for--you would generally reserve your effort for worthwhile things, and would be averse to farming energy yourself just to power frivolity or vice. How you determine what to put your energy into would explicitly be a moral question.
Instead in our world we an abstractions conceals the source of the energy. But if the moral concerns from the first world had any weight, they haven't lost it now; if energy is anything short of completely free we should by the same logic be averse to expending energy on worthless work or vice. The human being is not a utility monster, but something very different, and moral questions of this sort are central to how it navigates the world, they should not be dismissed.
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#33This is neat. I think I'm actually more interested in avg ChatGPT query than median single query so that I can enter a large query # and be confident in the associated energy cost for that larger number (e.g. what's the energy cost for 1,000 chat gpt queries)
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#34It was genuinely a surprise to see how much relative energy petrol cars use (and shame on me - I'm an electrical engineer). I mean I think I knew it intuitively, but this simple chart blew my mind.
When one gets in the weeds on EVs or ICE cars two things become shockingly clear: internal combustion is hilariously inefficient YET gasoline is hilariously energy dense. Most people's intuition is wrong on both of these points but then they cancel each other out.
Edit: another important point is that the "cost" to acquire gasoline is only the very end of the process. The energy has already been gathered, stored, and most of the processing is complete. Our cost (in money and energy) to "make" gasoline is really just gathering it. This is why the comparison to renewables is often a hard sell, it's just apples to oranges. Gasoline started on third base, renewables are batting from the plate. Some of the internal combustion enthusiasts are holding up e-fuels or synthetic fuels as the solution but then we have to pay for the entire energy gathering and processing pipeline and still be using a conversion method that's not at all efficient. It's the worst of both worlds.
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#35One hour of Claude code— well, I’d guess it would be comparable to an hour of driving an electric car. How to know?
OP says one query uses 0.3 Wh. Driving an electric car for 10 miles = 3,000 Wh which is roughly 10,000 Wh per hour.
I'm not sure how many queries is equivalent to an hour of Claude code use, but maybe 5 seconds, which means an hour of continuous use = 216 Wh, or ~50x less than an electric car.
OP has a longer article about LLM energy usage: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#36It was genuinely a surprise to see how much relative energy petrol cars use (and shame on me - I'm an electrical engineer). I mean I think I knew it intuitively, but this simple chart blew my mind.
When one gets in the weeds on EVs or ICE cars two things become shockingly clear: internal combustion is hilariously inefficient YET gasoline is hilariously energy dense. Most people's intuition is wrong on both of these points but then they cancel each other out. Edit: another important point is that the "cost" to acquire gasoline is only the very end of the process. The energy has already been gathered, stored, and…
The tyranny if the rocket/horse equation: You need energy to carry the energy you need to move.
There's a good reason so many sprawling civilizations of the past involve leveraging wind-power for transport.
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#37I can't find a github or email for Hannah - if you're reading this i'd like to add Australian energy price data via Open Electricity[0] to the data (reach out via my profile)
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#38For reference it would be good to have per-passenger numbers for "sitting on a diesel bus", "sitting on an electric bus", "sitting on a tram", "sitting on a commuter train" as well.
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#39I can't find a github or email for Hannah - if you're reading this i'd like to add Australian energy price data via Open Electricity[0] to the data (reach out via my profile) [0] https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/
Her github is here: https://github.com/HannahRitchie
Re: Does that use a lot of energy?
#40Wow, putting everything in the same units is really informative. Running my 450 watt gpu for a day is approximately equivalent to driving a car 10 miles.
I doubt your 450w gpu runs at that wattage 24 hrs, unless you're mining with it.
My (admittedly old) gpu+CPU idles around 50-75w.