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In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
(www.technologyreview.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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There are zero downsides when mentally associating an energy hog with "1 second of use time of the device that is routinely used for minutes at a time."
https://xkcd.com/1035/
With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don't eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.
Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.
You should probably not eat things because of how much calories they have or don't have, but because of how much of their nutrients you need, and how much they lack other, dangerous shit. Also eat slowly until you're full and no more. Also move a lot.
We shouldn't need calculators for this healthy lifestyle.
The reason for needing to know which foods are healthy is because... well, we forgot.
I'm not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave something sweet then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of some other desserts (baked sweets are often the worst offenders) is relatively high. That means that a lot can be gained simply by replacing one dessert with a different, equally tasty dessert. Hence my ice cream advocacy.
Yeah that's a good point, too. 😊
On a "respond to an individual query" level, yeah it's not that much. But prior to response the data center had to be constructed, the entire web had to be scraped, the models trained, the servers continually ran regardless of load. There's also way too many "hidden" queries across the web in general from companies trying to summarize every email or product.
All of that adds to the energy costs. This equivocation is meant to make people feel less bad about the energy impact of using AI, when so much of the cost is in building AI.
Furthermore, that's the median value--the one that falls right in the middle of the quantity of queries. There's a limit to how much less energy a query to the left of the median can use; there's a significantly higher runway to the right of the median for excess energy use. This also only accounted for text queries; images and video generation efforts are gonna use a lot more.
Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.
But do you actually know how much that is? Or are you just assuming it's a lot.
Individually you’re spot on. Your AI use doesn’t matter. But, and this is where companies tend to leave off, when you take into account how many millions (or billions) of times something is done in a day (like AI prompts), then that’s when it genuinely matters.
To me, this is akin to companies trying to pass the blame to consumers when it’s the companies themselves who are the biggest climate offenders.
I don't see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.
You’re right. But if I had to pick a why, I’d go with how microwaves at least provide a service for households by heating up food.
AI’s only viable service (at the time of this writing) is a replacement for viagra for techbros when they need to get an erection.