So, re: LLMs and the "jury is out on energy usage", I just want to point out a couple of historical things.

When studies came out linking smoking to increased risk of cancer, the Tobacco industry paid for and produced studies that said "nuh uh".

When Obesity and heart disease rates increased in the United States and the problem was linked to sugar intake, the sugar industry produced studies saying it was fats.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3490543/#sec4

The fact that the GenAI industry isn't providing actual data about their energy usage should make you _very_ skeptical about their claims of "it's fine".

And I'm a little disappointed in seeing folks I generally respect being like "oh no, it's not as much as you think" - y'all need to show me hard data.

Also, I would fucking hope a text extruder uses less energy than serving 4k video, the fact that it presently *isn't* is a travesty - nevermind its other travesties.

@cthos a bit of hard data from a point of view AI companies don't want to talk about: @iocaine

Daily stats from my crawler defense system, showing 7-8 million requests a day, against the very small and niche sites I host.

98% of my traffic is crawlers. It is their cost, which they try to push onto others. It's completely ridiculuous.

Even if the energy use of training and generating would be zero, the crawling cost, paid by literally everyone else, is not. This cost is easily demonstratable.

@cthos Sure all those GPU's Nvidia sold in the recent years are just sitting idle in some basement...

@algernon @iocaine Oh yeah, externalized energy usage is a whole thing too (as @aud mentioned in a reply)! Thanks for that.

Relatedly, the "these things use a lot of energy" crowd has shown their work in several articles, but the rebuttals are always along the lines of "your assumptions are wrong" backed up with 'vibes'.