from Hacker News

Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone

by dddavid on 12/1/23, 11:37 AM with 4 comments

• by atlas_hugged on 12/2/23, 6:15 AM

  Considering the title is already clearly wrong since I can generate many images, on device, even while in airplane mode, I don’t have high hopes for the study.

• by verdverm on 12/1/23, 1:45 PM

  The underlying calculations apparently depend on the following CSV: https://github.com/mlco2/codecarbon/blob/master/codecarbon/d...

  Two problems I see here

  1. They are using AWS, which is not in the data set

  2. The calculation set seems questionable to me. The GCP Iowa data center has some of the best renewable usage, are they using the data center total (a larger data center with more renewable can still have more total emmissions vs only 8% of the compute I use should be included in the calculation. Either way, the underlying data for the calculation is out of date

  edit...

  I opened an issue with the codecarbon project to see if we can get more clarity on things. I've include links there for the breadcrumbs I followed

  https://github.com/mlco2/codecarbon/issues/483

• by calamari4065 on 12/2/23, 2:37 AM

  My phone's battery is roughly 50KJ. A single nvidia a100 is spec'd at 250W max.

  That's 3.3 minutes to consume 50KJ.

  But that only considers a single GPU, the rest of the system will be consuming a good chunk of power. You also have to consider the entire datacenter's energy use.

  I'd say the claim is within an order of magnitude of being correct, but I seriously doubt it.

• by melagonster on 12/1/23, 12:03 PM

  ah, I expected article talks about this is too cheap or AI eat our lunch, but it is about carbon.