Sure we do. Do we want the big tech corporations to hold the reins of that though?

Because the training has diminishing returns, meaning the small improvements between (for example purposes) GPT 3 and 4 will need exponentially more power to have the same effect on GPT 5. In 2022 and 2023 OpenAI and DeepMind both predicted that reaching human accuracy could never be done, the latter concluding even with infinite power.

So in order to get as close as possible then in the future they will need to get as much power as possible. Academic papers outline it as the one true bottleneck.

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

This seems more realistic.

The real question is why anyone would want to use more power than a regular search engine to get answers that might confidently lie to you.

In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates for the water consumption and carbon emissions associated with a text prompt to Gemini.

Tbh, that won't be useful, like the guy above stated.

Google searches are very similar in terms of work that needs to be done. You could expect the average and the median to be very close. For example, take these numbers: 1,1,2,2,3. The median is 2, the average is 1.8.

AI requests vary wildly. GPT-5 for example uses multiple different internal models ranging from very small text-only models to huge, reasoning models and image generation models. While there's no way to know how much energy they use without OpenAI publishing data, you can compare how long computation takes.

For a fast, simple text-only answer ChatGPT using GPT-5 takes a second or so to start writing and maybe 5 seconds to finish. To generate an image it might take a minute or two. And if you dump some code in there and tell it to make large adaptions to the code it can take 10+ minutes to generate that. That's a factor of more than 100x. If most answers are done by the small text-only models, then the median will be in the 5 second range while the average might be closer to 100 seconds or so, so median and average diverge a lot.

If cheap(er/better) energy is invented then that's good, why would tech corpos be able to "hold the reins" of it exclusively?

And academia will work on that problem. It reminds me of intel processors "projected" to use kilowatts of energy, then smart people made other types of chips and they don't need 2000 watts.

Academia literally got cut by more than a third and Microsoft is planning to revive breeder reactors.

You might think academia will work on the problem but the people running these things absolutely do not.

Well, patents and what have you are a thing. I’m mostly thinking that I wouldn’t want e.g. Facebook to run any nuclear reactors or energy grids. That’s something I prefer the government does.

Found the American.

Because demand for data centers is rising, with AI as just one of many reasons.

But that's not as flashy as telling people it takes the energy of a small country to make a picture of a cat.

Also interesting that we're ignoring something here -- big tech is chasing cheap sources of clean energy. Don't we want cheap, clean energy?