a similar amount of energy to running a hair dryer
We see a lot of those kinds of comparisons. Thing is, you run a hair dryer once per day at most. Or it’s compared to a google search, often. Again, most people will do a handful of searches each day. A ChatGPT conversation can be hundreds of messages back and forth. A Claude Code session can go for hours and involve millions of tokens. An individual AI inference might be pretty tame but the quantity of them is another level.
If it was so efficient then they wouldn’t be building Manhatten-sized datacenters.
ok, but running a hairdryer for 5 minutes is well up into the hundreds of queries which is more than the vast majority of people will use in a week. The post I replied to was talking about it being 1-2% of energy usage, so that includes transport, heating and heavy industry. It just doesnt pass the smell test to me that something where a weeks worth of usage is exceeded by a person drying their hair once is comparable with such vast users of energy.
We see a lot of those kinds of comparisons. Thing is, you run a hair dryer once per day at most. Or it’s compared to a google search, often. Again, most people will do a handful of searches each day. A ChatGPT conversation can be hundreds of messages back and forth. A Claude Code session can go for hours and involve millions of tokens. An individual AI inference might be pretty tame but the quantity of them is another level.
If it was so efficient then they wouldn’t be building Manhatten-sized datacenters.
ok, but running a hairdryer for 5 minutes is well up into the hundreds of queries which is more than the vast majority of people will use in a week. The post I replied to was talking about it being 1-2% of energy usage, so that includes transport, heating and heavy industry. It just doesnt pass the smell test to me that something where a weeks worth of usage is exceeded by a person drying their hair once is comparable with such vast users of energy.