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In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
(www.technologyreview.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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I should have specified it was an earlier llama model. They have scaled up to more then a flight or two. You are mostly right except for how much a house uses. It's about 10,500 kW per year, you're off by a thousand. It uses in an hour about 8 hours of house time, which is still a lot though, specially when you consider musks 1 million gpus.
https://kaspergroesludvigsen.medium.com/facebook-disclose-the-carbon-footprint-of-their-new-llama-models-9629a3c5c28b
Their first model took 2 600 000 kwh, a plane takes about 500 000. The actual napkin math was 5 flights. I had done the math like 2 years ago but yeah, I was mistaken and should have at least specified it was for their first model. Their more recent ones have been a lot more energy intensive I think.
Thanks for catching, you are right that the average USA home is 10.5MWh/year instead of kWh. I was mistaken. :)
Regarding the remainder, my point is that the scale of modern frontier model training, and the total net-new electricity demand that AI is creating is not trivial. Worrying about other traditional sources of CO2 emissions like air travel and so forth is reasonable, but I disagree with the conclusion that AI infrastructure is not a major environmental and climate change concern. The latest projects are on the scale of 2-5GW per site, and the vast majority of that new electricity capacity will come from natural gas or other hydrocarbons.