this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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This article estimates that GPT-4 took around 55 GWh of electricity to train. A human needs maybe 2000 kcal (2.3 kWh) a day and lives 75 years, for a lifetime energy consumption of 63 MWh (or 840x less than just training GPT-4).
So not only do shitty "AI" models use >20x the energy of a human to "think," training them uses the lifetime energy equivalent of hundreds of humans. It's absolutely absurd how inefficient this technology is.
I think you underestimate how much time and energy it took to get us to this point. Like, billions of years of evolution to arrive at a brain as efficient as ours.
Did you just externalise all the other inputs?
It's usually a lot faster in producing outputs though.
How many R in strawberry ?
how many R not in strawberry?
depends what age your brain is, a 1 year old brain wouldn’t have a clue… and number of mental defects or how intoxicated the person is or whether you have vocalisation issues, health issues, if your brain is shut down/asleep for however many hours overnight it won’t be able to tell you anything, ai ofc doesn’t have these issues
it’s very likely actual electricity use will soon not be an issue, we are already flooded with too much solar power during the day, in maybe as little as 10 or so years we may have so much solar and battery we have essentially unlimited renewable power
on top of all of this ai is in its infancy, who knows where it will be at in 100 years, maybe jobs are a thing of the past and we just spend all day socialising and spending time on our hobbies
That could be true in the future, but right now a large chunk of our energy comes from fossil fuels.
Any AI that can take a significant amount of work from humanity is going to have an architecture fundamentally different than LLMs. They're not thinking, they're just spitting out plausible sounding sentences.
Human energy needs are incredibly variable so the estimates for normal consumption are wrong for most people, but when you get into essential systems (basically cardiovascular and nervous, not even including digestive or any muscle movement) you actually need even less - the average (by weight, height & age) man needs 1950kcal or so and the average woman (by height, weight & age) needs 1450kcal or so
When we replace AI with brains in jars I'm sure we can cut it down even more though