It is indeed very suspicious that they talk about "median" and not "average".

For those who don't understand what the difference is, think of the following numbers:

1, 2, 3, 34, 40

The median is 3, because it's in the middle.

The average is 16 (1+2+3+34+40=80, 80/5=16).

On a "respond to an individual query" level, yeah it's not that much. But prior to response the data center had to be constructed, the entire web had to be scraped, the models trained, the servers continually ran regardless of load. There's also way too many "hidden" queries across the web in general from companies trying to summarize every email or product.

All of that adds to the energy costs. This equivocation is meant to make people feel less bad about the energy impact of using AI, when so much of the cost is in building AI.

Furthermore, that's the median value--the one that falls right in the middle of the quantity of queries. There's a limit to how much less energy a query to the left of the median can use; there's a significantly higher runway to the right of the median for excess energy use. This also only accounted for text queries; images and video generation efforts are gonna use a lot more.

The article also mentions each enquiry also evaporates 0.26 of a milliliter of water... or "about five drops".

I wonder how many people clutching their pearls over this also eat meat...

This doesn't really track with companies commissioning power plants to support power usage of AI training demand

It does if you consider that they are actually building them to support power usage of datacenters. And that datacenters are used for a lot more than just AI training.

Oh, sorry I forgot that data centers were just invented. Thanks for the reminder!

No you're right, they built the first one, all the demand that could ever be needed is covered by it, and there's no reason to ever build any more.

Yet they've never needed to commission power plants to dedicate power to these facilities. It's almost like there's some new, uniquely power-hungry demand that's driving this that's sprung up in the last 5 or so years...

There were people estimating 40w in earlier threads on lemmy which was ridiculous.

This seems more realistic.

I did some quick math with metas llama model and the training cost was about a flight to Europe worth of energy, not a lot when you take in the amount of people that use it compared to the flight.

Whatever you're imagining as the impact, it's probably a lot less. AI is much closer to video games then things that are actually a problem for the environment like cars, planes, deep sea fishing, mining, etc. The impact is virtually zero if we had a proper grid based on renewable.