Just read that some AI models use more power than a small town

I was looking at a report from a tech site last night, and it said training a single large language model can use enough electricity to power 100 homes for a year. That's wild to me. We talk about AI being smart, but nobody mentions the energy bill. Found it on a deep dive about data center costs. It makes you wonder about the real price of all this progress, you know? Has anyone else seen numbers like that and felt kinda weird about it?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_anthony4d ago

Check the fine print on those reports, because the numbers get wild. I saw one that claimed a big training run used more power than my entire state uses in a month. The real kicker is they often use the highest possible estimate, like the AI is running full blast on the newest, least efficient hardware for the whole time. It's still a ton of energy, but context matters. Makes you question if we're building these things just because we can, not because we should.

the_jennifer4d ago

Exactly, the context gets totally lost in those big scary numbers. It feels like a lot of reporting wants the shock value more than the real story. Makes it hard to have an honest talk about what we're actually doing.

wendyprice4d ago

Yeah, "because we can" is basically the tech industry's mission statement these days.