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Comment by ugurs | Hacker News Reader

Without knowing the cumulative amount of energy consumption it is not a fair comparison. If there are one billion llm sessions every day, it is still a lot of energy.

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No, not really. A billion people (15% of the population) drive more than a mile a day. Well over 100 million laptops are sold every year. These are easy numbers to look up.

Just look at your own life and see how much of each you would use.

So do LLMs mean fewer people have to drive a mile every day?

These don't have to be dependent to be meaningful.

I think the point is that we all need to use less energy, we need to avoid flights from LA to Tokyo where possible, not using the energy use as an excuse to use even more energy.

> we all need to use less energy

We need cheaper and cleaner forms of energy. More efficient uses of energy.

I do not agree that we "all" need to use less energy overall. Energy use tracks wealth pretty closely, and manufacturing/creating things tends to be energy intensive.

The more cheap clean energy we make available, the more novel uses will be found for it.

> We need cheaper and cleaner forms of energy. More efficient uses of energy.

Yep that's the dream, but it's not what I have coming out of my wall right now.

> Energy use tracks wealth pretty closely,

I'm guessing the majority of users on this site are in the 1% globally so it seems reasonable to consider what's produced/manufactured for us and what services like these that we're using

> The more cheap clean energy we make available, the more novel uses will be found for it.

That will be a brilliant future but it's not the reality today.

If you want to meaningfully cut your energy usage, you need to identify its biggest sinks. 8 Wh per day is about as much as an idle charger you don't bother to remove from the outlet. I've yet to hear about anyone evaporating lakes with a charger, yet we almost all leave them plugged it.

It would be better to not use this energy, but it won't move the needle either way.

Do we need to use less energy, or do we need to use less fossil fuel based energy?

Both. We need to stop using fossil fuels altogether. And we need to use the other energy more efficiently.

Yes quoting energy use per query isn't the full picture, though it is still a useful benchmark for understanding the relative impact of one's use as an individual. As for cumulative impact, the ieee article gives an estimate of 347 TWh per year by 2030, which is still a very small fraction of global energy consumption today.

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