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In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
(www.technologyreview.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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The human mind uses about 100 watt. The equivalent would be 400 questions per hour, 6 per minute or one every 10 seconds. That's close to human capacity.
There are zero downsides when mentally associating an energy hog with "1 second of use time of the device that is routinely used for minutes at a time."
https://xkcd.com/1035/
With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don't eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.
Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.
You should probably not eat things because of how much calories they have or don't have, but because of how much of their nutrients you need, and how much they lack other, dangerous shit. Also eat slowly until you're full and no more. Also move a lot.
We shouldn't need calculators for this healthy lifestyle.
The reason for needing to know which foods are healthy is because... well, we forgot.
I'm not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave something sweet then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of some other desserts (baked sweets are often the worst offenders) is relatively high. That means that a lot can be gained simply by replacing one dessert with a different, equally tasty dessert. Hence my ice cream advocacy.
Yeah that's a good point, too. 😊
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.
Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.
But do you actually know how much that is? Or are you just assuming it's a lot.
Individually you’re spot on. Your AI use doesn’t matter. But, and this is where companies tend to leave off, when you take into account how many millions (or billions) of times something is done in a day (like AI prompts), then that’s when it genuinely matters.
To me, this is akin to companies trying to pass the blame to consumers when it’s the companies themselves who are the biggest climate offenders.
I don't see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.
You’re right. But if I had to pick a why, I’d go with how microwaves at least provide a service for households by heating up food.
AI’s only viable service (at the time of this writing) is a replacement for viagra for techbros when they need to get an erection.
This doesn't really track with companies commissioning power plants to support power usage of AI training demand
They want to handle lots of prompts.
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...
Never?
huh? every data center i've been to has hundreds of megawatts of stand-by power generation which is regularly used to take up slack, because data center loads are peaky as hell. when facebook was building their first european datacenter in 2012 they were heavily criticised for their planned local power infrastructure, which was and still is diesel generators. the one being built in my area, which is a colo, has planned for over 700MW of local generation despite being built next to multiple hydro dams.
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...
I'll bet you're a stinking water drinker yourself. Probably a liter or two a day. And probably luxuriating in clean water when you could be using your body to recycling toilet water.
In addition:
Thank you! I skimmed for that and gave up.