[dist-epoch]

For every calorie a human consumes, hundreds or thousands more are used by external support systems.

So yeah, you do use 2000 calories a day, but unless you live in an isolated jungle tribe, vast amounts of energy are consumed on delivering you food, climate control, electricity, water, education, protection, entertainment and so on.

[b112]

By that metric, the electricity is only part of it. The cost of building the harsware, the cost of building the roof and walls for the datacentre, the cost of clearing the land, cost of humans maintaining the hardware, the cost of all the labour making the linux kernel, libc6, etc, etc. Lots of additionals here too.

[bamboozled]

It's almost like...nothing exists in a vacuum.

[greenthrow]

Are you going to include all the externalities to build and power the datacenters behind LLMs then? Because i guarantee those far outweigh what it takes to feed one human.

[unyttigfjelltol]

Including support from ChatGPT. It really is a comparison of calories without ChatGPT and calories with, and that gets to the real issue of whether ChatGPT justifies its energy intensity or not. History suggests we won't know until the technology exits the startup phase.