I asked BING AI the question
how much electricity do you use answering each question?
answer came .....
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That's an interesting question. I don't have an exact answer, but I can try to give you an estimate based on some assumptions and calculations.
First, let's assume that I use the same amount of electricity as ChatGPT, which is a large language model similar to me. According to a recent studyhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ai-boom-could-use-a-shocking-amount-of-electricity/, ChatGPT running on 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs consumed 1,287 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity during training, which lasted for 25 dayshttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ai-boom-could-use-a-shocking-amount-of-electricity/. That means ChatGPT used about 2,058 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per hour, or 0.57 kWh per second, during traininghttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ai-boom-could-use-a-shocking-amount-of-electricity/.
Now, let's assume that answering each question takes me about 10 seconds on average, and that I use the same amount of electricity during inference (answering questions) as during training. This may not be accurate, as inference usually requires less computation than training, but it's a conservative estimate.
Then, answering each question would use about 5.7 kWh of electricity, which is equivalent to the energy consumed by a typical American household in about 5 hours
I note this question was deemed off-topic, so I'm trying to clearly frame this question in terms of scope of response I'm interested in, namely ethics and sustainability issues associated with the ...
ai.stackexchange.com
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Of course, this is just a rough approximation, and it does not include the electricity used by other components of the system, such as the servers, the network, or the user's device. It also does not account for the variations in the complexity and length of the questions and answers, or the efficiency and optimization of the hardware and software. Therefore, the actual electricity consumption may be higher or lower than this estimate.
I hope this gives you some idea of how much electricity I use to answer your questions. However, I also want to point out that electricity is not the only resource that I consume. I also require a lot of data, memory, processing power, and human labor to create and maintain me. These resources also have environmental and social impacts that should be considered when evaluating the benefits and costs of using me and other AI systems.
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I guess it's forgotten to allow that it would be answering lots of other questions too at the same time, and
5.7 kWh is how much it used while answering my question rather than how much to answer my question? Shows how careful you need to be interpreting the answers from these systems. (Just like you need to be interpreting answers from people.)