In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses

Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by vitorbaptistaa on Thursday August 21, 2025 @10:39AM (#44973366)

That's very interesting, although I'm still curious about the training resource usage -- not "only" inference. I wonder what is the relative importance of training (i.e., what percentage of the resource usage was in training vs. inference)

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Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by cillian64 on Thursday August 21, 2025 @11:28AM (#44974012)

One random preprint I found (https://arxiv.org/html/2505.09598v2) estimates inference is 90% of the total energy usage. From some googling around, everything seems to agree that inference dominates (or is at least comparable to) training on the large commonly-used models.

I was less surprised that inference dominates training after I read that chatgpt is serving billions of requests per day.

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Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by jeffbee on Thursday August 21, 2025 @10:46AM (#44973463)

Many papers on large models make claims about the energy used. Google has consistently said that training and inference use about the same fraction of their data center resources.

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Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by IAmBroom on Thursday August 21, 2025 @10:45AM (#44973446)

Same could be said for anything: human operator, google search algos pre-AI (where indexing = training), etc.

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Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by beepbooptheory on Thursday August 21, 2025 @11:10AM (#44973775)

Is this just meant to be dismissive, or just like a kind of non-answer? That it could be said for anything doesn't make asking it of this specific thing unimportant or uninteresting.

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Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by add-sub-mul-div on Thursday August 21, 2025 @10:46AM (#44973459)

Right, and the scraping, the extra storage required, the manufacture of all the extra GPUs, etc. This is them hoping people don't understand that the query is only one part of it and aren't curious enough to ask further questions.

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Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by xnx on Thursday August 21, 2025 @11:11AM (#44973783)

It's rare to see this type of calculation anywhere, though I wish it weren't.

A miles per gallon number for a car doesn't count the diesel that went into the equipment to mine the ore to make the steel for the chassis, etc.

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