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Comment by godot | Hacker News Reader

The energy usage concern is also funny in that it doesn't try to compare the energy usage of a human doing the same task (if one were to not use LLM to do the task). If we assume it's true that asking ChatGPT a question costs 3 bottles of water, you should take into account how long that question takes to answer by a human doing the research. If it takes you a couple of hours, you need to include the food and drink intake it takes to power yourself for a couple of hours. If it's anything like beef or almonds it takes way more than 3 bottles of water.

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I don’t think it’s valid; you would have consumed food and drink either way. Plus, you need to verify the output of the LLM anyway.

If it takes you 5 minutes to verify the output of the LLM vs 3 hours to do the research work to come to an answer, you saved 2h55m of human time.

You would use the 2h55m to do another task.

I feel like it is indeed a valid comparison of energy usage.

How did we go from energy consumed to human time?

The caloric needs of a human are minuscule compared to the electricity converted to waste heat to train and operate an LLM.

> How did we go from energy consumed to human time?

Directly. Energy is consumed by humans over time.

That time may be spent on doing tasks. Spending that time doing task increases energy consumption over baseline (though humans have substantial energy storage, so, for tasks shorter than couple hours, the cost is usually paid after such tasks).

> The caloric needs of a human are minuscule compared to the electricity converted to waste heat to train and operate an LLM.

The costs of operating: not really, and that's the whole point of comparison. Sure, humans are energy-efficient in some aspects - but the brains can only do so much. There's plenty of work that LLMs do faster and better than humans, so much better that no human can match them. And speed means more tasks, so energy use per task is lower.

Also, if you're talking about cost of operating LLMs in general - i.e. keeping them running and doing arbitrary work, you really need to compare it against costs of keeping a human alive and available to do the work. So it's not just food, but also hygiene - including e.g. delivering water, heating water for laundry and showers, etc. - and similar consumables.

As for training costs, that must be a joke. Do you know how much it costs to train a human? Energy or otherwise? As a parent of three kids I'll tell you: a lot.

If you include the energy a human uses from birth to ~18, and then energy used while they're trained for whatever jobs you want to compare against AI, then the comparison gets even worse for humans.

The humans already exist. We’re neither creating nor destroying them for the purpose of doing an LLM equivalent task, nor am I bathing or clothing myself to think up an answer to something, and evaluating the problem as though we are is a sick joke. This is the most unserious argument in favor of AI I’ve seen to date.

The scenario is a task needs to be done. Whether it's for business, personal, whatever. It's a task. It needs to be done somehow. It can be done by a human, or by AI.

We are calculating the cost of doing this task. I don't know how else we can be more clear.

Honestly I'm very unconvinced by this article author's sense of need to calculate the energy cost of the LLM as an argument against it. But if we're using it as an argument, it's only fair to compare how else the task can be completed (i.e. by the human) and what it would cost. What is there to not understand about this comparison?

> We’re neither creating nor destroying them for the purpose of doing an LLM equivalent task

Sure, so drop the training costs on both sides.

Imagine company sends you on a business trip to a different country, for a month-long stay. Okay, you exist and have to eat and sleep anyway, but I can't imagine you accepting this as an argument from your employer - "we don't need to reimburse your hotel or food or other expenses, after all, we're neither creating nor destroying you for purpose of this assignment, and you'll be eating and sleeping and bathing anyway".

No, we don’t have to create an LLM to do a task. That’s a choice with costs we can evaluate.

If you really don’t understand how corporate travel arrangements work, I’ll clue you in:

Your employer reimburses your hotel even though you’d be sleeping anyway because your place to sleep doesn’t exist in the place they’re sending you. They pay your meals because eating out is more expensive than eating at home and your food and kitchen at home doesn’t exist in the place they’re sending you and also traveling is a pain so you deserve to treat yourself a little. They don’t generally reimburse your laundry costs unless you have stay more days than one can reasonably carry clean clothes for in a standard suitcase. Your bathing needs come free with the hotel.

I hope this helps you navigate the strange and confusing world we live in.

Thank you for the explanation. It matches my experience of having been sent across the world on business trips that lasted a month per stay (yes, standard suitcase doesn't fit enough clean clothes for those).

I don't see your problem with the comparisons. We don't have to hire people and train them for the job either. GPUs already exist and could be running something else than LLMs (say, crypto miners).

I feel it's you who's having problems drawing boundaries to allow for an apples-to-apples comparison.

The people are there expensing energy even if you don’t hire them, but we can choose not to expend the energy to make an LLM. I don’t know how to explain it any more simply than that.

but you can't delete people? That's actually the big problem that need to be addressed imo. It happen now (or later) with llm, but in the past it have been a problem with industrialization (big unemployment of workers) and then globalization (unemployment of more local workers).

If it's not addreased correctly, llm won't be a progress for humanity.

But if you want to compare it "technically", maybe it's better to look at computer usage now vs with llm maybe (how many google request, sim failed, screen on etc.)

The human being is there anyway and will eat/drink wether you ask them a question or not.

I'd argue the 3 bottles of water are strickly negative compared to a human doing the same.

You would use those couple of hours to work on something else that isn't answering that specific questions, so IMO it is a valid comparison.

I agree, with the addendum that the value of the output should also be considered here - Does the value of the work justify the cost?

Lol are we already at the level of psychopathy to be considering not giving humans water because they're less efficient than an LLM?

That is exactly what I am trying to point out; that considering the energy usage of LLM is a level of psychopathy, because that LLM is doing productive work that a human otherwise would.

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