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A comment on AI's energy footprint. Parent comment

Re:AI's energy footprint by lkbm on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @08:34PM (#44047273)
> If what you're saying is true, why are we hearing about AI companies wanting to build nuclear power plants to power new data centers they think they need to build?

Well, partly because they (all but X, IIRC) have commitments to shift to carbon-neutral energy.

But also, from the article:

> ChatGPT is now estimated to be the fifth-most visited website in the world

That's ChatGPT today. They're looking ahead to 100x-ing (or 1,000,000x-ing) the usage as AI replaces more and more existing work.

I can run Llama 3 on my laptop, and we can measure the energy usage of my laptop--it maxes out at around 0.1 toasters. o3 is presumably a bit more energy intensive, but the reason it's using a lot of power is the >100MM daily users, not that a single user uses a lot of energy for a simple chat.

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Re:AI's energy footprint by finebalance on Wednesday May 21, 2025 @09:10AM (#44051076)
> not that a single user uses a lot of energy for a simple chat.

This seems like a classic tragedy of the commons, no? An individual has a minor impact, but the rationale switching to LLM tools by the collective will likely have a massive impact.

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