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by estebarb 4 days ago
I can do high level thinking for around 6 hours with just two scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee.

What I need is something to prevent me from context drift. /starts googling how many scrambled eggs are equivalent to the energy consumed by a data center. Google how many chickens are in the world.../

2 comments

Consider that you can do this as a working day because someone else is plowing the fields that grow your food, probably burning stored energy in fuels for the process

We're sadly not that efficient. The 150kcal/6h=600kcal/day you've mentioned aren't enough, and it takes more than 600kcal to create 600kcal plus transportation into your home

Besides, we won't stop existing, so any math about "chatgpt uses X kW and so it's better than hiring another human" doesn't work out. The human doesn't stop burning fuels when not in use: any LLM usage is additional energy that needs to be generated while staying within CO2 budgets

> and it takes more than 600kcal to create 600kcal plus transportation into your home

This is not a strong argument or at least a different area of discussion. Because you can say exactly the same for the electricity: you need more than the power. You need the coal+transportation, or power plant, or solar panels ...

I'm pretty sure humans are much more energy efficient ... for certain tasks ;)

Sure, do the math for both, considering also that the human will continue to run anyway and then see who should do the task to minimise worldsuck :P
I find AI helps a lot with my context drift (or attention deficit). I can now simply burst type questions one after another in a large prompt, then have the AI do all the relevant searches / data collections, and spit them out quickly, scratching many itches at once.

The problem is then that I get more questions, but AI can handle them faster than I can muster them up or type them. So it's a net win