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Estimating AI energy use

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Estimating AI energy use

#61

Post by deaux »

qnleigh wrote: post #31

For reference, global energy consumption is about 180,000 TWh[1]. So while the numbers in this article are large, they're not a significant fraction of the total. Traveling and buying things are probably a much bigger part of your carbon footprint. For example: - 25 LLM queries: ~8.5 Wh - driving one mile: ~250-1000 Wh - one glass bottle: ~1000 Wh [2] - a new laptop: ~600,000 Wh [3] - round-trip flight from LA to Tok…

For reference, this is based on figures given by Sam Altman, which are worth as much as going to random.org and asking it for a number between 0 and 100 to use as Wh per LLM query.

Scratch that, the latter is probably more reliable.

Re: Estimating AI energy use

#62

Post by deaux »

JimDabell wrote: post #15
blibble wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We used the figure of 0.34 watt-hours that OpenAI’s Sam Altman stated in a blog post without supporting evidence. what do you think the odds of this being accurate are? zero?

Why would you assume that? It’s in line with estimates that were around before he posted that article and it’s higher than Gemini. It’s a pretty unsurprising number.

Back in the 1980s, I'm sure Philip Morris' claimed similar numbers on cigarettes (not) causing cancer as R.J. Reynolds did.

I also wouldn't be surprised if Aramco and Rosneft gave similar estimates on global warming and oil's role in it.

Re: Estimating AI energy use

#63

Post by beeflet »

XorNot wrote: post #35
givemeethekeys wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are consumers paying for electricity used by server farms? Why can't the electricity companies charge the server farms instead? Where I live, the utility company bills you at a higher rate if you use more electricity.

Because electricity prices are an auction, so increased demand is bidding up the price anyway. You need strong residential consumer protections to avoid this.

do you? maybe we just need more supply

Re: Estimating AI energy use

#64

Post by beeflet »

epistasis wrote: post #41
ch4s3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Serves of the big names in this space have green energy pledges and are actively building out nuclear power.

Nobody is actively building out nuclear power. Microsoft is turning on a recently decommissioned facility. New nuclear is too expensive to make sense. At most there are small investments in flash-in-the-pan startups that are failing to deliver plans for small modular reactors. The real build out that will happen is solar/wind with tons of batteries, which is so commonplace that it doesn't even make the news. Those ca…

There are a couple companies doing HTGR and SMRs that seem to be on track.

Re: Estimating AI energy use

#66

Post by christkv »

geuis wrote: post #11

My thoughts. Current gen AI is going to result in the excess datacenter equivalent of dark fiber from the 2000's. Lots of early buildout and super investment, followed by lack of customer demand and later cheaper access to physical compute. The current neural network software architecture is pretty limited. Hundreds of billions of dollars of investor money has gone into scaling backprop networks and we've quickly hit…

This. I totally agree we will see better architectures for doing the calculations, lower energy usage inference hardware and also some models running on locally moving some of the "basic" inference stuff off the grid.

It's going to move fast I think and I would not surprised if the inference cost in energy is 1/10 of today in less than 5 years.

Re: Estimating AI energy use

#68

Post by renewiltord »

beeflet wrote: post #63
XorNot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because electricity prices are an auction, so increased demand is bidding up the price anyway. You need strong residential consumer protections to avoid this.

do you? maybe we just need more supply

The residential consumers also oppose that. Usually they try very hard to reduce it. E.g. Diablo Canyon NPP

Re: Estimating AI energy use

#69

Post by AlecSchueler »

exitb wrote: post #57
globular-toast wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do LLMs mean fewer people have to drive a mile every day?

These don't have to be dependent to be meaningful.

I think the point is that we all need to use less energy, we need to avoid flights from LA to Tokyo where possible, not using the energy use as an excuse to use even more energy.

Re: Estimating AI energy use

#70

Post by MatekCopatek »

blueblisters wrote: post #36
givemeethekeys wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are consumers paying for electricity used by server farms? Why can't the electricity companies charge the server farms instead? Where I live, the utility company bills you at a higher rate if you use more electricity.

> consumers paying for electricity used by server farms wait what? consumers are literally paying for server farms? this isn't a supply-demand gap?

It's a supply-demand gap, but since the reasons for it are very apparent, it's completely reasonable to describe it as "consumers paying for [the existence of] datacenters".
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