In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao writes about the rise of OpenAI and the impacts of AI around the world. Below is an extract from the book on the effects on Chile's mineral reserves and water resources.
And that translates directly to energy consumption - a single ChatGPT-style conversation can use as much electricity as charging a smartphone, which is why companies are scrambling to build more efficient AI chips and why they need so many power stations (you can compare some on gearscouts.com to see the best $/Wh values for emergency backup).
Regarding AI, some simple examples of likely computing expense:
To be honest we lost that war when JavaScript dominated everything.
PHP would like a word.
Nowadays with JIT #1 and #2 are very close. There was less than a x2 performance gap when I compared a direct simple task in C and javascript.
About #3 no one does that.
#3 and #4 will be on the same scale, every token generated is roughly the same amount of CPU.
And that translates directly to energy consumption - a single ChatGPT-style conversation can use as much electricity as charging a smartphone, which is why companies are scrambling to build more efficient AI chips and why they need so many power stations (you can compare some on gearscouts.com to see the best $/Wh values for emergency backup).