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Re:AI, but at What Cost? Breakdown of AI's Carbon Footprint by nxpnsv on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @08:31AM (#42852067)
The author seems to assume that each daily user is running a new prompt every hour. I suspect the actual median number of images per DAU is lower than that. A user doing 20Wh roughly corresponds to heating a single meal in the microwave, it probably is not a leading cause of their carbon footprint.
Re:AI, but at What Cost? Breakdown of AI's Carbon Footprint by oscarmoxon on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @08:34AM (#42852102)
by this metric, Midjourney produce 1,920,000,000 images/day, that would put it on-par with Google at 8.9bn searches/day!
Re:AI, but at What Cost? Breakdown of AI's Carbon Footprint by wiether on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @09:13AM (#42852494)
Yeah, their estimates makes no sense.

They say :

> As of January 2025, Midjourney has nearly 20 million daily active users.

No, its the total number of users on the Discord server. Completely different than "daily active".

They say :

> assuming each user executes one prompt per hour in average

To be more realistic (most humans sleeping for a few hours each day...) it should be 24 prompts per day on average.

Sure, some users can make a lot of queries each day, but I don't see how a regular user would need 96 images each day.

So those figures makes no sense since they are based on wrong ones in the first place, and also completely irrealistic asumptions.