Casey Crownhart
@caseycrownhart.bsky.social
8.8K followers 160 following 110 posts
Climate tech reporter at MIT Technology Review ~ big fan of batteries and also the New York Mets. Want me in your inbox? Sign up for The Spark: technologyreview.com/spark
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Reposted by Casey Crownhart
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
Researchers still want more disclosure and more standardized data to compare models, but it's interesting to peek behind the curtains here and get some new details. Who wants to publish their numbers next?
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
There's a water estimate, too: 0.26 mL, or roughly five drops. That assumes 20% of what's withdrawn is recycled and 80% is consumed. (If you convert Altman's ChatGPT number, that's 0.32 mL, so again, pretty close.)
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
If you assume Google's emissions are based on the average of the grids where it operates, the total emissions would instead be about three times higher, 0.09 grams per query. (Rough math but you get the idea.)
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
One more interesting tidbit for my climate folks - the emissions estimate, 0.03 grams of CO2 per query, is only that low because the company is taking credit for all its clean energy purchases.
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
We also don't get any information here about the total number of queries per day or per month. (Give me Q, I want to know Q!)
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
The company talks in the report specifically about using the median instead of the average because it sees some outliers that can use much more energy than what it considers a typical query.
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
Entering a lot of text, getting a long response back, and using reasoning models would all likely push that energy figure higher. So would image and video generation, probably, though this report is specifically about text.
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
But there are still limitations to what's being revealed here. One note is that this is not an average, but a median—so a query that's picked out of the middle of a range. We don't know what that range is, at all, or how it's distributed.
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
What's notable about the Google news is that we get a lot more information here. Rather than just dropping a number, the company provided details about what's included—not just energy from the AI chips, but also the host machine's CPU + DRAM energy, cooling systems, power conversion, and so on.
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
The Google number is also in the ballpark of a figure that Sam Altman shared on his blog in June - he said that a query to ChatGPT uses about 0.34 watt-hours of electricity and 0.000085 gallons of water (inconvenient unit, but whatever) blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-s...
The Gentle Singularity
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots...
blog.samaltman.com
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
In our analysis published in May (with a lot of help from the research team behind ML.energy) @jamesmodonnell.bsky.social and I found that prompts to text models ranged from 0.03 watt-hours to 1.9 watt-hours - with a medium model (Meta's 3.1 70B model) hitting pretty close to this Google figure.
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
The company points out that this is lower than some numbers that often float around (a popular one is 3 watt-hours, that one is quite old at this point and also was an estimate, not a direct measurement).
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
This rocks - congratulations!! 🥳
Reposted by Casey Crownhart
jtemple.bsky.social
The Data Foundation is fundraising for a new initiative that will coordinate efforts among nonprofits, experts & companies to modernize US greenhouse-gas measurements, striving to build on a Biden effort that Trump nullified on his first day in office.
How nonprofits and academia are stepping up to salvage US climate programs
The Data Foundation, the American Geophysical Union, and a coalition of universities are scrambling to ensure that the nation accurately assesses the growing dangers of global warming.
www.technologyreview.com
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
OpenAI has said that ChatGPT receives 1 billion messages every day (as of December)
caseycrownhart.bsky.social
Notably, OpenAI declined to share any info with us when we were putting our story together. We would welcome more transparency, including figures for image and video generation.