source?

My guess is that's off by a bit, but sure let's assume that's true.

Now measure the amount of electricity the same prompt will use in 6 years when both algorithmic efficiency and 3-4 generations of silicon lower that by 95% (or more).

Will your microwave become 95% more efficient over the next 6 years? No.

Also how many video prompts will the average person run in a given year? Almost certainly 0. I heavily use AI daily and have probably played with AI video less than 4 times, ever.

Yet certainly the average person will use 20,000-100,000 microwave minutes over their lifetime. I use my microwave for 2-3 minutes every day at lunch for example.

From first principles, the idea that electricity use = bad is wrong. If your electricity comes from burning coal or lignite, then obviously yes using that electricity has bad externalities.

But a french person running their microwave on Nuclear powered grids? This is good. Dirty energy sources is the problem. Not energy use itself.

Obviously, there's different options and variables and bla bla bla, but considering how consolidated and highly industrialized and standardized meat production is, this data is very likely close enough to true for the wast majority of beef burgers eaten by the people complaining about AI resource consumption: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

Your source cites https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-... which in turn claims to be based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271 but uses 0.14 kWh as the energy consumption for a 100-token request to GPT-4, which is an order of magnitude larger than any figure in that paper. Based on a speed of 18 tokens/s https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-4/performance the implied power draw is ≈91 kW, about two thirds of a 72-GPU rack https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet_SuperCluster_... I somewhat doubt that the model is large enough to require an entire rack's worth of GPU memory, but even if that were the case, a single request is going to get batched with hundreds or thousands of others at the same time, so the true energy consumption should be much smaller than that.

This beef industry organization cites 3 studies: https://www.beefresearch.org/resources/beef-sustainability/f...

> U.S. specific estimates put beef water use at 317, 441 and 808 gallons per pound of boneless beef when precipitation water is not accounted for in calculations.

So, let's just say around 400 gallons of water per pound of beef if you don't include rainfall use.

Let's look at Almonds which _could be_ produced where water is not scarce, maybe, but instead is grown in central valley CA based on quickly depleting ground water.

Each almond takes about a gallon of water to grow: https://www.almonds.org/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise

A "drop" is not well defined, but some math says there's about 75,000 drops in a gallon: https://www.quora.com/How-many-drops-of-water-can-fit-into-o...

Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.

That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

Well, I've got a small server rack and roof top solar, therefore data centers don't actually use water.

In other words, bringing up some anecdotal, hyper specific (how many meat eaters just "have a few cows"?) information says absolutely nothing about the truth of the matter, but a lot about what you believe constitutes an argument.