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by jnwatson 534 days ago
Inference uses hardly any compute. You should be complaining about computer games for real compute use.
2 comments

I'm pretty sure they meant emissions/load from inference and/or training TIMES all the current LLM users on the Earth...
Yes, but you've got to balance that against the equivalent human processing time. Meatbags are notoriously carbon-intensive to feed.
Humans use tiny amounts of energy compared to even a smartphone. And they consume the vast majority of that energy regardless of whether they're lounging in bed or pouring over medical records.
A human burns say 2000 kcal / day. That's about 2.3kW hours / day.

An iPhone 16 pro battery appears to have about 18 watt hours. So approximately 100x less then a human uses.

Oops, you're right, I misremembered some basic facts here...
I remembered there was some analogy about a person doing some work walking, with an average diet, versus using an internal combustion engine. In terms of carbon emissions.

The engine came up more favorably.

Turns out, eating any meat and industrial agriculture transportation are really heavy.

What about crypto?