If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person we'd increase energy consumption by more than double.

The continuous energy footprint per person globally averages to 356 watt currently.

A Mac Studio m4 max in low power mode consumes ~50-100 watt on 100% gpu consumption. On GPU idle it is ~10 watt. If we imagine improved models (e.g. qwen 3.8 is a 5b moe which is way faster to process) and improved chip performance on 2nm and half a day of usage (the AI will sleep when we sleep then):

((75 watt / 2 [faster models]) / 2 [faster chips]) / 2 [half a day of usage]) => ~ 10 watt.

AI for everyone does not imply pC mAsTeRraCe for everyone.

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hhjinks a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

500 watts continuous isn't realistic, unless you foresee a 24/7 digital shadow society where AIs interact continuously without user input.

	▲	pixl97 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Really the METR report on autonomous agent behaviors is a required read. I think the AI's would only do a tiny percent of their talking to their human. Voice itself is only a limited method that we interact with the world. Imagine the LLM seeing what you see, monitoring your health, monitoring your interactions with the world around you and then optimizing around that. For these things it will be talking to its own agents/subagents and the AI agents that operate the services of the world in this imaginary world. Maybe you also think of it as a self contained business that provides services to you. Even when you're not busy consuming services from that business, that business typically keeps running and doing things for when you need it next.

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cheema33 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person...

Would we all be driving the 500 Watt GPU hard 24/7? And the premise that the "AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026" likely does not include semiconductor progress. You are very likely to be able to run Fable class AI model on something that is significantly more efficient in 2040.