Take the heat
Remember last Wednesday’s essay?
What? You don’t!
You never read it??
Let’s fix this now. Here it is. I’ll wait.
Okay, so I am whining about how hot it was last Wednesday. (Update: A week later, the heat has not abated.) I note that this Heat Dome is just one of the many consequences of climate change. Or, as I write in the essay, “one of the ways we humans are making it harder to live on this planet, one of the ways we are killing our home.”
And then I go about chatting with chatgpt, cleverly asking it to write some copy for me (three poems) so I don’t have to write. Because it’s hot. Because climate change.
Oh, the irony.
In engaging with chatgpt, I am directly contributing to the MASSIVE (read on to see just how massive) consumption of energy by AI and the data centers it takes to support people like me asking questions.
I wanted to try to discover just how much energy. So…irony…I consumed a bunch of energy in a lengthy back-and-forth with Alexis Imara (careful readers of last week’s essay will recall this is the name chatgpt gave itself when I asked), and here is what I discovered:
It comes in snippets, as I try to understand, as I reframe my questions.
Each query might use the equivalent of a 10-watt (LED) lightbulb burning for about 1.59 minutes. Interesting…but I wanted to dig deeper. How many queries?
A large-scale deployment of ChatGPT might handle around 25,000 queries per second or 1,500,000 queries per minute.
Stay with me now, this gets wonkier. I am not reproducing all the screens of math that get to this next calculation.
Energy consumption for the above is calculated at 23,850 kWh per minute. (kWh is kilowatt-hour, a measure of energy usage.)
Which is 34,344,000 kWh/day.
I asked chatgpt to help me make sense of this by comparing to our energy use.
--34,344,000 kWh per day is approximately equal to the daily consumption of about 1,192,500 average American households.
--34,344,000 kWh per day is approximately equal to the daily consumption of about 11.4 medium-sized cities with 100,000 people each.
--34,344,000 kWh per day is approximately equal to the daily consumption of about 3 large cities like New York City.
This is not just me playing around with chatgpt, of course. It is you on FB or IG scrolling around and getting the link to this essay. It is me uploading this essay right now. It is me taking a moment to find a zucchini bread recipe. But hey, I grow a lot of my own vegetables, and I recycle, and I have solar, and I drive a hybrid. So, I’m absolved, right?
WRONG.