The huge energy waste is from model training, not inference

killerstorm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

A continuously running agent might require 100-500W for inference, so comparable to gaming or a small space heater. Not obscene, but also not negligible.

If we assume 250W for a continuously running agent, Grok 4 training run estimate would be around 50 million session-days, so a half-million people might consume as much running agents continuously for 100 days.

	▲	roenxi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		We might suspect the hardware used for the LLM is very similar to a graphics card and so the wattage would be extremely similar to using a graphics card to display a game's graphics in the first place. Which puts a certain ironic perspective on tokarf's original comment.

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xbmcuser an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

if that was true tokens would be free

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jstummbillig an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

"waste"

All of a sudden we are selectively squeamish with computer resource usage, when we were fine having all that fun with computers and hardware, 3 monitor setups, using graphic cards to play games (dear lord!) and tinkering around with home rigs of every proportion and wattage for no reason at all.

	▲	killerstorm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Driving a car consumes 25+ more energy per hour than gaming. So urban planning which encourages people to drive likely results in an order of magnitude more waste than all home computer use.