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Does that use a lot of energy?

hannahritchie.github.io

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Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#41

Post by empath75 »

oulipo2 wrote: post #18
bena wrote: post #3

My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…

Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that: - first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution - they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summariz…

LLM calls are getting cheaper every day.

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#42

Post by dylan604 »

MerrimanInd wrote: post #34
jwilliams wrote: post #28

It 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…

Train locomotives have used diesel powered generators that then powers electric motors. Would this be less efficient than battery powered EVs? Or better asked, what would be the most efficient use of gasoline?

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#43

Post by jfengel »

I'm surprised that cooling takes less energy than heating. I imagine that depends a lot on the temperature range; they only need so much to cool a room even on a "hot" day in the UK.

Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to take enormous energy for it to work at all.

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#44

Post by tl2do »

jwilliams wrote: post #28

It 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.

In Japan, my country, this looks a bit different. A lot of electricity still comes from oil- and gas-fired plants. The mechanics differ (gas turbines vs. car engines), but in both cases we’re still relying on combustion. I suppose some countries have the same issue.

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#45

Post by Rebelgecko »

jfengel wrote: post #43

I'm surprised that cooling takes less energy than heating. I imagine that depends a lot on the temperature range; they only need so much to cool a room even on a "hot" day in the UK. Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to take enormous energy for it to work at all.

I think specifically it's comparing gas heating vs AC. Heat pump heating would probably do better. In other words, it takes less energy to move heat inside/outside than to "create" it

(With caveats like heat pumps are much less effective in extreme cold)

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#46

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

What’s startling to me is how many comments in this thread just take the provided values as gospel without asking questions that methodology answers either in the abstract or barely describes. Also going giving a cost for “United States” is absolutely nonsense - electricity, gas and gasoline prices vary widely across the country. There is no one cost for each, and the average is worthless for this kind of thing (especially since the average of each - gas vs. electric vs. gasoline cost - are independent variables that have no relation to each other on a region by region basis).

Why are people so gullible?

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#47

Post by rsolva »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #30

One hour of Claude code— well, I’d guess it would be comparable to an hour of driving an electric car. How to know?

It is not only about raw power consumption. Comparing driving an electric car with using AI only in kW hides a major point: Hyperscale datacenters are massively centralised, which brings it's own problems; a lot of energy is used for cooling, and water consumptions is enormous. Charging electric cars at home is distributed and does not suffer from the same problems as the centralised hyperscalers do. Also, running AI models at home is not much different than a gaming session :)

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#48

Post by janalsncm »

creeble wrote: post #40
janalsncm wrote: post #17

Wow, 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.

During training it’s running at around 410. But yeah idling at 450 would be pretty crazy.

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#49

Post by lm28469 »

jfengel wrote: post #43

I'm surprised that cooling takes less energy than heating. I imagine that depends a lot on the temperature range; they only need so much to cool a room even on a "hot" day in the UK. Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to take enormous energy for it to work at all.

Yeah without knowing the climate, temperature delta and insulation these values don't really mean much.

Re: Does that use a lot of energy?

#50

Post by PowerElectronix »

quotemstr wrote: post #5
bena wrote: post #3

My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?" And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates. Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity. You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricit…

> You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometime…

Useful work is debatable here, a lot of people just talk to the thing or use it instead of searching the internet.

The owners surely think, or at least want us to think that it is very useful indeed, otherwise we'd see no point in burning through piles of investors cash to buy overpriced ram, storage, gpus, cpus, nics, secure the power to run it and then subsidise the users to use it.

I do think that transaction is wrong and it's going to bite them in the ass in the long term, but I don't have the money to outbid them for the power. I do get to see them crash and burn when the investors get impatient.

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