asking chat GPT a simple question burns as much energy as a 25 minute hot shower
it this supposed to make me think AI is remotely efficient?
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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chapotraphouse
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it's one year of use which is defined in the link as 100 interactions per day.
so asking chat GPT a simple question uses 0.2Wh of energy.
and asking chat GPT 365250 simple questions burns the energy of a 25 minute hot shower.
I seriously doubt this though. Running a local model thats way weaker than any chatgpt models makes my PC turn into a jet engine for 5 minutes straight
sure. but how much water could your PC bring to shower temperatures? heating water is very energy intensive.
Idk but now I'm curious, gonna go run the bath, I'll let you know!
lol
So it looks like he just read the first result that shows up...
https://deteapot.com/chatgpts-carbon-footprint-how-much-energy-does-your-ai-prompt-really-use
But if you read an actual study you get a much better idea of how wasteful AI is.
These two by far showcase it the best. This AI stuff is pretty wasteful
and none of this accounts for training energy, pretraining/data synthesis/augmentation energy, energy consumed by human labor curating the data, and then multiplied by a number > 1 because all of those efforts failed in multiple ways at various times and had to be repeated
It gets even more horrific now that google forces you to use ai.
You can end your searches with “-ai” , but many times Google will simply ignore that and shoehorn AI when you didn’t ask for it anyways.
Oh boy I wonder what the fine print under that asterisk will be 🤔
There is no need to wonder, there is a link in the picture. It's 100 messages back and forth per day.
That's a load bearing asterisks .
a hot shower taking five minutes sounds like a statistic AI would come up with.
Sure for just making and returning queries, but what about the model training in the first place, what about dust to dust on the data centre and the water usage etc.
Cool how their metric for chatbot usage can mean literally anything, very helpful chart
Cool now do one for image and video generation
yeah but all those other things have real utility. the chatbot just tells you information that you end up having to use a search engine to double check anyways
Thereby inducing more energy demand due to AI overviews
Imagine calling yourself a scientist while ignoring the absurdly massive energy investment in training any "current" chatbot and all of the models that came before it, and collecting and labeling all the data those tasks require all so you can pretend that the unadjusted per-forward-pass energy consumption is the true cost of its "use" .
EPFL schmepfl
Everyone knows text is basically free, what about the ai image and animation generation energy use, huh?
Baths make me feel good and smell nice.
AI tells me to put super glue on pizza and makes creepy images of anime girls with fucked up hands.
Broke: Think twice Woke: Twink thighs
That asterix is doing a whole lot of work there.
Whats the minimum KWH usage of the datacenter that must always be running, waiting for queries, always scraping the internet for new training data?