This is such a strange metric. When light bulbs were first invented, they also used more electricity than entire countries. So what? All that means is countries have very different levels of energy consumption.

According to Wikipedia, China uses 118,000 times more energy than, say, Nauru. Okay, and?

Is A.I. doing useful work in exchange? Absolutely, especially when compared to crypto. On a per output basis it's probably also more energy efficient than human writers and artists who wastefully metabolize cow products.

I don't know that we should be measuring productivity on an output per watt-hour basis to begin with, but if we did, we should at least put it in context.

Training an AI costs 40 home-years worth of energy... that's it?! How is that even newsworthy? The value AI gives us, now and in the future, is way way greater than a random selection of 40 households. Energy well spent.

If we truly cared about energy efficiency, human metabolism is incredibly inefficient. Do we really want to go down the path of comparing algorithms versus biological power usage? It's not going to look pretty for us.

Put another way, if ChatGpt uses 500 MWh a day, that's about a quarter tank of single 747's fuel. It's not even a rounding error.

Is it worth it? Probably. Is it significant? I'd say no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_pri...