They only do that because they project it to be profitable, i.e. they project demand for it.
It’s also asinine to claim that people don’t want it just because you don’t.
Comment on Google and Microsoft consume more power than some countries
x1gma@lemmy.world 4 months agoIt’s not surprising per se, but it’s something that people should be more aware of. And a lot of this consumption is not providing global services (like the Google search or workspace suite) but the whole AI hype.
I didn’t find numbers for Google or Microsoft specifically, but training ChatGPT 4 consumed 50 GWh on its own. The daily estimates for queries are estimated between 1-5 GWh.
Given that the extrapolation is an overestimate and calculating the actual consumption is pretty much impossible, it’s still probably a lot of energy wasted for a product that people do not want (e.g. Google AI “search”, Bing and Copilot being stuffed into everything).
masterspace@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Womble@lemmy.world 4 months ago
To put a bit of context on those, 50GWh is a medium sized power station running for 2 days. To create something that is being used around 10 million times a day all over the world.
At 10 million queries per day that puts the usage per query at 100-500 Wh, about the amount of energy used by leaving an old incandecent lightbulb on for an hour, or playing a demanding video game for about 20 minutes.