[sdoering]

So basically running a microwave for about 800 seconds, or a bit more than 13 minutes per model?

Oh my god - the world is gonna end. Too bad, we panicked because of exaggerated energy consumption numbers for using an LLM when doing individual work.

Yes - when a lot of people do a lot of prompting, these 0ne tenth of a second to 8 seconds of running the microwave per prompt adds up. But I strongly suggest, that we could all drop our energy consumption significantly using other means, instead of blaming the blog post's author about his energy consumption.

The "lot of burned coal" is probably not that much in this blog post's case given that 1 kWh is about 0.12 kg coal equivalent (and yes, I know that we need to burn more than that for 1kWh. Still not that much, compared to quite a few other human activities.

If you want to read up on it, James O'Donnell and Casey Crownhart try to pull together a detailed account of AI energy usage for MIT Technology Review.[1] I found that quite enlightening.

[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

[XorNot]

The better answer is just "I don't care".

Because I definitely don't care. Energy expenditure numbers are always used in isolation, lest any one have to deal with anything real about them, and always are content to ignore the abstraction which electricity is - namely, electricity is not coal. It's electricity. Unlike say, driving my petrol powered car, the power for my computers might come from solar panels, coal, nuclear power stations, geothermal power hydro...

Which is to say, if people want to worry about electricity usage: go worry about it by either building more clean energy, or campaigning to raise electricity prices.

[sdoering]

Funny, I actually care. But I try to direct my care towards the real culprits.

So about 50% of CO2 emissions in Germany come from 20 sources. The campaigns like personal footprint (invented by BP) are there to shift the blame to consumers. Away from those with the biggest impact and the most options for action.

So yes, I f**ng don’t care if a security researcher leaves his microwave equivalent running for a few minutes. But I care, campaign in the bigger sense and also orient my own consumption wherever possible towards cleaner options.

Full well knowing that even as mostly being reasonable in my consumption, I definitely belong to those 5-10% of earth's population who drive the problem. Because more than half of the population in the so called first world live according to the Paris Climate Agreement. And it’s not the upper half of.