In the late 2000s there was a push by a lot of businesses to not print emails and people use to add a ‘Please consider this environment before printing this email.’
Considering how bad LLMs/‘ai’ are with power consumption and water usage a new useless tag email footer should be made.
see again you compare something someone might do once a day and most people do hardly ever. Using a blender. With something used many times constantly through out the day. Web searching. Even before ai datacenters were a massive use of energy. Now im not the type to say throw it all away but I will be careful in my usage till im sure its worth it. this is going to require the vendors to put out data on energy usage. Its new enough that im sure more and better chips will be able to reduce the energy it takes. You have to realize your talking to someone who walks if I can, then bikes as a second option, and finally takes public transit. I avoid driving and planes unless I absolutely have to. Im in tech so I will be using it but it will likely follow the same curve as previous technology has but maybe not given smartphones and apps would be the most recent things before ai and I use those only if I absolutely have to.
i had no car my entire life and have flown 4 times (i like trains lol).
Ok, something nearly everyone does - washing clothes.
A 500W washing machine uses this amount of energy in 10.8 seconds during the spin cycle.
Using a dryer? 4.3 seconds@3000W.
If we look at the equivalent mechanical energy, lets look at your bike (you gotta eat to offset the energy loss, causing emissions through agriculture and cooking!)
You can generate a Chatbot response by pedaling ~2 minutes@100W power!
The chips are already pretty optimized, since they are in principle not different to high-end gaming GPU’s. I have a 3070 TI, and i can generate a complex response locally in under a minute @ 290W TDP, 30-40 seconds if i use something like qwen 2.5, which aligns pretty well with what i’ve said before. Playing a video game uses a lot more power.
2 minutes for every query and im 100% not using it and I think these numbers like 2 min of biking aren’t really based on anything. It will help again if the industry makes it a point to track and publish energy usage.