MIT Technology Review - AI's Energy Footprint

MIT Technology Review - AI's Energy Footprint:

One billion of these every day for a year would mean over 109 gigawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power 10,400 US homes for a year. If we add images and imagine that generating each one requires as much energy as it does with our high-quality image models, it'd mean an additional 35 gigawatt-hours, enough to power another 3,300 homes for a year. This is on top of the energy demands of OpenAI's other products, like video generators, and that for all the other AI companies and startups.

But here's the problem: These estimates don't capture the near future of how we'll use AI. In that future, we won't simply ping AI models with a question or two throughout the day, or have them generate a photo. Instead, leading labs are racing us toward a world where AI “agents” perform tasks for us without our supervising their every move. We will speak to models in voice mode, chat with companions for 2 hours a day, and point our phone cameras at our surroundings in video mode. We will give complex tasks to so-called “reasoning models” that work through tasks logically but have been found to require 43 times more energy for simple problems, or “deep research” models that spend hours creating reports for us. We will have AI models that are “personalized” by training on our data and preferences.

Naturally, AI labs and providers aren't sharing data the public needs to make sense of the impact they are imposing on our energy landscape. I appreciate MIT Technology Review pulling together experts and data sources here.

In summary:

Per-query inference energy usage is small but scales with query complexity.
Guess what—queries are trending multiples more complex as applications roll out.
Aggregate AI energy demand is already staggeringly high, growing at eye watering rates, and, currently, doing so with the most carbon-intensive generation sources.

Suffice to say, #ShowYourStripes will have to display global temperature change in UV and logarithmic scale soon. And don't expect 10-20% electricity rate increases to stop anytime soon.

We need energy usage transparency from the companies. We need massive solar and storage to support growth cleanly.