That would be really remarkable, considering the total power capacity of a phone battery is in the neighborhood of 0.015 kWh
I hedged as "not unlikely" because I'd need to think harder about the amortization of more energy expensive videos vs less energy expensive ones and how much energy you can actually attribute to a video vs the video solely being an activity that would be an add-on to something that would happen anyways.
But it's not just the energy expenditure of a phone.
(I also think that 0.5 kilowatt-hours is an overestimate of energy expenditure by potentially up to two orders of magnitude depending on how much batching is done, but my original comment did say 0.5 kWh).
But this is kind of a worst case cost analysis. I fully expect that the average non-pro Sora 2 video has one to two orders of magnitude less GPU utilization than I listed here (because I think those video tokens are probably generated at a batch size of ~100 per batch).
Where do you get this from?
Timing-wise, I'm making an extremely liberal estimate. (In reality, Sora 2 takes about 2 minutes to generate a video in my testing).
The thing that matters here is ultimately the product of time and memory (the latter of which I use as a stand-in for calculating number of chips being used), so I'm more or less asserting that the models being used to generate the free Sora 2 videos have less than 6 trillion parameters (since 2 minutes being 1/5 of 10 minutes give us a 5x multiplier we could apply to 1.3 TB), or less than 24 trillion parameters with aggressive quantization. I can explain why I think parameter count is less than 6 trillion if you'd like, but it's pretty hand-wavy intuition.
Data centers seem to have wholesale rates of around 4 cents per kilowatt-hour on the higher end.
This gets you 2 cents per video. If you're generating 50 million videos per day (an estimate on the higher side of how many TikTok videos are uploaded every day), that costs you a million dollars a day.
So if you entirely subsidized for free the entirety of all of TikTok's video generation just using LLMs, I don't think energy generation costs exceed 365 million a year (and I think this might be very severely estimating costs, but there are some large error bars here).
I'm pretty sure OpenAI (or any company) would be pretty happy to pay 365 million dollars a year for the soft social power of something like TikTok. Just the influence this buys in politics and social discourse would be worth the pricetag alone.
And that's of course leaving aside any form of monetization whatsoever (where in reality you'd likely be charging the heaviest users the most).
N.B. I'm also not sure it's actually more power efficient for users to post their own content in absolute terms. It seems not unlikely that the amount of energy it takes to produce, edit, and process a TikTok video exceeds half a kilowatt-hour. But maybe you're focused solely on the video hoster.