For all the criticism of AI, this is the one that’s massively overstated.

On my PC, the task energy of a casual diffusion attempt (let’s say a dozen+ images in few batches) on a Flux-tier model is 300W * 240 seconds.

That’s 54 kilojoules.

…That’s less than microwaving leftovers, or a few folks browsing this Lemmy thread on laptops.

And cloud models like Nano Banana are more efficient than that, batching the heck out of generations on wider, more modern hardware, and more modern architectures, than my 3090 from 2020.

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…Look. There are a million reasons corporate AI is crap.

But its power consumption is a meme perpetuated by tech bros who want to convince the world scaling infinitely is the only way to advance it. That is a lie to get them money. And it is not the way research is headed.