A human consumes about 100 watts when not doing any physical exertion (round number, rule of thumb). So unless you can show an LLM running on 100w compute with capabilities similar to a human, they’re less efficient.
Of course I could do all of my coding alone again, but I would be slower. It's like walking to the mall several times per week, several hours per time, instead of once or twice per week with a car, three cumulative hours. I trade a higher energy consumption for more time to do other things and the ability to live far away from shops.
Counting the 100w for 24 hours for a human doesn’t match up with counting the power usage from “AI” for only the 10 minutes it’s doing a task.
Also - units issue: 100 watts for a day is 2400 watt-hours. It’s a moot point anyway because the power draw for the frontier models is an order of magnitude off that the division by 24 is basically meaningless.