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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Yes, 1Gw was a hyperbolic exaggeration.
I looked it up now out of curiosity and it's estimated training a state of the art LLM (image gen uses significantly less) at trillions of parameters uses about 10-20,000kw, which is 1-2% of 1Gw. So apparently if that model is used by 300 million people (which is less than the population of the USA, and it'd be accurate to say a popular model would have about that much usage if not more), it would actually be about 0.036-0.067w per person, or toasting bread for less than 10 seconds.
So training a model does use a lot of electricity, but considering how much it's used / how often, using it definitely generates more than training it I'd say.
I was also implying using the model locally on your own hardware rather than a data center. Local uses less energy because the hardware doesn't use as much power. It's also much slower, but it's also not destructive like an AI data center.
And yup, Adobe paid for the training data used. But, you know, Adobe. But ultimately, something large and centralized would be the only way to run the tech if we're expecting it to be useable as is.
My personal ethics are if it's used for personal use and not by a corporation, it's fine and ethical. After all, Linux is based of code very very few people get paid to make, if paid at all. If all those separate people had to start paying for each bit if code, Linux couldn't exist either. That said, I think compiling it all is it's own heavy work too. After all, just like the separate code won't spontaneously become a Linux OS, separate pieces of art/books won't spontaneously combine to make something new.
I donate and pay when I can, probably more so than most on Lemmy, for music , software, art, etc; even though it's hard for me to afford to. But if it's in public, it's strange to be surprised when someone uses it. After all, there's no reason to post anything you make online - that's a choice that was made.
What I do strongly disagree is a corporation (in particular large ones with plenty of money really) doing it for profit. Such as Meta did with pirating books.
Your units don’t make sense. Watts shouldn’t be used for a fixed energy usage it’s like saying a car drove across the U.S. and it did it at 4 gallons per hour.
The more useful metric to use is Gwh so chatgpt3 used 1.3 Gwh which isn’t bad but gpt4 used 62.3 Gwh in training plus an extra 1 Gwh per day
I get what you're saying now.
That said, I still get the analogy by saying a car used 4 gallons per hour - it still indicates how fuel efficient something is. Especially if compared to something else
But the problem is you don’t have anything to tie that to. if you have a car that gets 4 gph but goes 100 mph then it’s more efficient than a car that gets 3 gph but only goes 50mph but even with those you miss out on the actual efficiency which for a car is usually transporting people.
So if car A gets 4 gph at 100 mph and transports 2 people it gets 50 passenger miles per gallon of gas which is finally an actually useful metric
For LLMs that becomes much harder to quantify but a useful metric might be wh per minute of time saved or mL of water per minute of time saved. Unfortunately to quantify those you would need to do much more in depth analysis and probably also factor in false readings and time lost from that
Did you ask ChatGPT for these figures? Would explain why you're using nonsensical units.