[primis]

Watts are actually a time independent measurement, note that the TWh has "hour" affixed to the end. This is 1 Tera Watt over the course of one hour, not one second. Your numbers are off by a factor of 3600.

1TWh / 20 Watt brain = 50,000,000,000 (50 Billion) Hours.

50 Billion Hours / (24h * 365.25) = 5,703,855.8 Years

[gnfargbl]

Thanks for explaining the calculation! There is a huge error though, which is that I mis-read the units in the second link I posted. The actual power estimate for GPT-3 is more like 1 GWh (not 1TWh), so about 6000 years and not 6 million...!

[swyx]

lol, this is more like the other estimate’s ballprk… 1 TWh sounded way off and i was like “wait i gotta check this”

[gnfargbl]

Yeah, the other thing that I should have noticed was the completely unreasonable cost of 1 TWh of energy. If 1 kWh cost about $0.15 at the time they trained the model, 1TWh would have been like $150M. Probably twice that after accounting for cooling. Doh.

[swyx]

thank you both.. was googling this and found some stackexchange type answers and still got confused. apparently it is quite common to see the "per time" part of the definition of a Watt and get it mixed up with Watt-hours. i think i got it now thank yoyu

[TeMPOraL]

It is. The main culprit, arguably, is the ubiquitous use of kilowatt hours as unit of energy, particularly of electricity in context of the power company billing you for it - kilowatt hours are what you see on the power meter and on your power bill.

[jeffbee]

If you’re going to reinterpret watts on one side you have to do it on both sides. So, by your thinking, which is not wrong, 1h*1TJ/s vs 20J/s. As you can see, you can drop J/s from both sides and just get 1/20th of a trillion hours.