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morning-coffee 5 days ago

[flagged]

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jryle70 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Your complaint sounds strange and petty to me. Trivial questions can lead to meaningful acts. Take this question:

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/research-goblin/#histor...

One who is passionate about it can totally donate to conservation efforts or raise the awareness about it.

As it's often said, "curiosity is the mother of invention".

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simonw 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't buy that my curiosity has a meaningful energy usage impact.

I can accept that these questions are more intense than simpler prompts - running dozens of prompts in a chain to answer a single question.

Best estimates I've seen are that a single prompt is equivalent to running an oven for a few seconds.

I'm OK with my curiosity running an oven for a full minute!

Here are my collected notes on AI energy usage: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-energy-usage/

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morning-coffee 5 days ago | parent [-]

My question regrettably left out an unstated extrapolation I was inferring... what happens when we all "just google-ai it" when we're bored?

Of course I don't think the energy usage of your individual questions is an issue. I also appreciate your data gathering and reporting of it. I didn't mean to come across as critical of your personal use of AI to gather and report this data.

Again, it's the collective effects I'm more worried about. I'm hoping that, collectively, we're all gaining some value from the growing energy expenditures required to obtain it: https://apnews.com/article/climate-google-environmental-repo...

	▲	simonw 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Something I found thought-provoking was this comment about Jevons: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/11/datarama/ Basically: if something useful gets cheaper, people may end up using it way more such that the total energy usage increase is materially large. I do think there's a risk of that happening here: an AI-assisted search is inevitably more expensive than a single web search (since it runs potentially dozens of additional searches on top of the LLM inference cost). I could counter that and say that now I can resolve a complex question in 30s with a single typed prompt, where beforehand I might have spent 10 minutes running my laptop and running dozens of searches by hand, for a net increase in spent energy. ... but actually, for trivial curiosity questions I just wouldn't have bothered looking for an answer at all. I value curiosity deeply though, so maybe it's worth the world burning a few more gigawatts if the result is a more curious population?

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ACCount37 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How high are those "high energy costs" - compared to other common hobbies or recreational activities?

I mean things like watching Netflix on a large screen TV in 4K, playing Battlefield 6, cooking a very fancy meal, doing recreational shopping, or simply driving to any location that's 30 minutes away.

I find it incredibly hard to imagine that a few minutes of GPT-5 inference are somehow the most "energy intensive" way to spend your idle time.