283
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
283 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
74292 readers
4180 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.