Part of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of the art" — 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W.

So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.

Is it though? When I ask an LLM research questions, it often answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an entire afternoon to figure out with traditional research.

Similarly, I've had times where it wrote me scientific simulation code that would take me 2 days, in around a minute.

Obviously I'm cherry-picking the best examples, but I would guess that overall, the energy usage my LLM queries have required is vastly less than my own biological energy usage if I did the equivalent work on my own. Plus it's not just the energy to run my body -- it's the energy to house me, heat my home, transport my groceries, and so forth. People have way more energy needs than just the kilocalories that fuel them.

If you're using AI productively, I assume it's already much more energy-efficient than the energy footprint of a human for the same amount of work.

How so? A human needs the entire civilisation to be productive at that level. If you take a just the entire US electricity consumption and divide it by its population, you'll get a result that's an order of magnitude higher. And that's just electricity. And that's just domestic consumption, even though US Americans consume tons of foreign-made goods.

Ah! And don't get me started about how specific its energy source must be! Pure electricity, no less! Where a human brain comes attached with an engine that can power it for days on a mere ham sandwich!

you didn't consider the 18+ years we have with almost no productivity and the extra resources required to sustain life

try to calculate 12312312.123213 * 123123.3123123

A computer uses orders of magnitude less energy than a human.

It's all about the task, humans are specialized too.

EDIT: maybe add a logarithm or other non-linear functions to make the gap even bigger.

How much energy did evolution "spend" to get us here?

I agree human brains are crazy efficient though.

That’s about the energy a laptop or two uses at full tilt.

You can't compare a training run that produces a file which can be run forever after to a human day

Beyond wasteful the linked article can't even remotely be taken seriously.

> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.

What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.

And then we get this gem...

> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.

So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO₂e per kWh using something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.

This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being applied to procure energy in any way possible with little regard to health or environmental impact.