Writing a 100-word email using ChatGPT (GPT-4, latest model) consumes 1 x 500ml bottle of water It uses 140Wh of energy, enough for 7 full charges of an iPhone Pro Max

  • zerozaku@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    6 days ago

    I have read the comments here and all I understand from my small brain is that, because we are using bigger models which are online, for simple tasks, this huge unnecessary power consumption is happening.

    So, can the on-device NPUs we are getting on flagship mobile phones solve these problems, as we can do most of those simple tasks offline on-device?

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      6 days ago

      I’ve run an LLM on my desktop GPU and gotten decent results, albeit not nearly as good as what ChatGPT will get you.

      Probably used less than 0.1Wh per response.

          • Monsieurmouche@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            4 days ago

            Good point. But considering the frequent retraining, the environmental impacts can only be spread on a finite number of queries.

            • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              4 days ago

              They have already reached diminishing returns on training. It will become much less frequent soon. Retraining on the same data if there isn’t a better method is useless. I think the ressources consumed per query should only include those actually used for inference. The rest can be dismissed as bad faith argumentation.

    • Avieshek@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      6 days ago

      Yes, kind of… when those businesses making money out of the subscriptions are willing to ship with the OS for free which something only Apple has the luxury to do instead of OpenAI who doesn’t ship hardware or software (like Windows) beyond an app that’s less than 100MB. Servers would still be needed but not for general cases like help me solve this math or translation. Stable Diffusion or Flux is one example where you only need the connection to internet when downloading a certain model like you wouldn’t necessarily want to download every kind of game in the world when the intention is to play games arises.