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IshKebabtoday at 2:17 AM9 repliesview on HN

A billion tokens per day?? Plausible estimates put the energy use at about 0.001 Wh/token, which means you're using 1000 kWh/day in electricity, just to generate slop. That's about the same as 50-100 houses. 300kg of CO2 per day - roughly the same as flying from London to New York every three days.

I think on average AI energy usage is not as big a deal as everyone is panicking about, but your usage is truly absurd and I don't know how you can live with that. It's immoral.


Replies

kolinkotoday at 8:32 AM

That’s for i/o tokens, mostly output. 90-98% is cache read usually, so you can divide electricity use by 10 at least.

As for co2, it depends on the provider, it could be way lower as well.

As for ethics, you don’t know what he works on, and how effectively - he might be saving 10x that much of co2 for the planet.

WASDxtoday at 8:20 AM

I'm glad someone is voicing this. Overconsumption at that level is not defensible. However if they meant cached tokens so it's not that bad.

Gangway0829today at 2:23 AM

I can't speak for that guy, but I'm a physicist and work in clean energy... So it's not too hard! That said, I usually am closer to 10M on days I do heavy coding, so not nearly that bad.

paxystoday at 2:24 AM

Token caching is a thing

throwup238today at 2:26 AM

You really think OpenAI is selling $1500/mo of electricity (at $0.05/kwh) for $200/mo?

I’m guessing that Wh/token estimate is several orders of magnitude too high.

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f6vtoday at 11:21 AM

> just to generate slop

Do some people still deny you can do a shit ton of work with AI?

lannisterstarktoday at 2:44 AM

1. You do not know what they're using it for. 2. Get off your high horse please. 3. Immoral my ass.

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pertymcperttoday at 6:08 AM

Most tokens are cached.

_zoltan_today at 7:32 AM

"slop"? come on. we're not in 2020 anymore, Dorothy.