Measurable [LWN.net]

Measurable

Posted Mar 4, 2026 14:03 UTC (Wed) by gmatht (subscriber, #58961)
In reply to: Well this is interesting by roc
Parent article: Gram 1.0 released

It is nice to be able to personally check the amount of power being used. With various people claiming that using AGI is destroying the world it is reassuring to know that your AGI is using way less power than a gamer (let alone Aircon, automobiles etc.).

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Measurable

Posted Mar 4, 2026 15:30 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

Those measurements will be ignoring issues like the exponentially increasing training cost - a couple of years ago Anthropic's CEO said it then cost $100M to train a model but would soon reach $10B, and maybe $100B [1]. This year they reportedly expect to spend $7B on inference for paying users (not counting free users) and $12B on training [2], for an overall loss of about $11B. They're expecting costs will keep increasing, and they're just one of several companies developing large models. That's quite a lot of GPUs and electricity.

One report estimated data centers will increase from 4.4% of total US electricity usage in 2023, to 6.7-12% by 2028 [3], which is not an insignificant fraction and is about level with residential plus commercial air conditioning [4].

(I don't think energy usage is the strongest criticism of generative AI, but it's not a trivial issue.)

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-cost-10-bil...
[2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-hikes-2...
[3] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-e...
[4] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=1174&t=1

Measurable

Posted Mar 6, 2026 2:10 UTC (Fri) by gmatht (subscriber, #58961) [Link]

Well, these don't affect the marginal cost of me running AGI on my GPU. I doubt that they are spending billions on electricity just so I can download a gratis model for Ollama.