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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • These figures are too cherry picked for the shock value. You could go the opposite end and say that (these are all true, I’ve tried my best to research them):

    8.5 Wh (average of all daily queries for a user) is also…

    • Equivalent to running a 2000 W hair dryer or a kettle for 20 seconds
    • Equivalent to idling a car during a traffic light and not turning off the engine
    • A quarter of the energy required to reheat a ready meal in the microwave (roughly 45 Wh)
    • The power usage of a Macbook screen over just 30 minutes.

    850 MWh (whole consumption of all AI queries in the world) is also equivalent to…

    • The power consumption of ONE single cruise ship for 12h (link)
    • Charging 0.002% of the 75 million electric cars in the world
    • The energy stored in the fuel tanks of 2000 petrol cars - a small stadium car park in Europe
    • The amount of energy the largest solar plant in Spain or Germany generate… In a couple of hours.

    So yes - AI bad… But for other reasons. This is a diversion. Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.

    The problem isn’t that the whole world needs less than a solar farm’s worth of energy for AI. The bigger problem is the social damage of AI - including the fact that this “expansion at all costs” is justifying getting that energy from non-renewable sources.

    But seriously, one single cruise ship uses more energy than all of the AI in the world. They serve no useful purpose and there are hundreds of those.