One thing about these numbers that's absolutely shocking to me is how low the energy use is:
> That model’s usage was well within our budget ($68, about 4kWh of energy use / 365 grams of carbon emissions).
The energy cost is literally 1% of the total cost. For context, 4kWh of energy would drive you about 15 miles in an EV, about half of the average person's daily driving miles. It's boiling 10 gallons of water.
With the talk of AI data centers' impact on the world, you'd think this would be 10x to 100x the amount of energy in order to get the effects they're using here.
My takeaway: the AI data center buildout is an overbuild probably at least as large as the fiber buildout that left us with so much dark fiber. If not even bigger. The only thing that will save the economy is the inability of NVIDIA and chip fabs to produce enough chips to match the buildout planned.
I agree but it does worry me how fast my usage is increasing. Two months ago I was using 10x less tokens and probably not much more than 5kWh on inference. This month about 30kWh on inference. If it becomes more affordable, is there going to be another jump? Not quite sure
At some point the agents will be good enough that you can tell them "here's $100, go make me money" and they will, maybe not a lot and not all the time, but the EV given the cost of inference will be positive.
This seems somewhat obviously true, to some degree, but it all depends on the prompt, I think?
In the equilibrium, profits fall to zero in capitalism, but there's never equilibrium, everything is changing. Profit comes from insights that others haven't seen, from access to opportunities that others don't have, or through monopolistic control generating economic rents.
For that AI to make money, it has to have a harness that gives it one of the above things, which does seem possible.
But strictly time-limited, because as soon as someone else figures out what you are doing, there's no moat to prevent them from telling their AI to do it too.
Markets reach equilibrium very fast when everyone has access to the exact same tools and information.
epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
> That model’s usage was well within our budget ($68, about 4kWh of energy use / 365 grams of carbon emissions).
The energy cost is literally 1% of the total cost. For context, 4kWh of energy would drive you about 15 miles in an EV, about half of the average person's daily driving miles. It's boiling 10 gallons of water.
With the talk of AI data centers' impact on the world, you'd think this would be 10x to 100x the amount of energy in order to get the effects they're using here.
My takeaway: the AI data center buildout is an overbuild probably at least as large as the fiber buildout that left us with so much dark fiber. If not even bigger. The only thing that will save the economy is the inability of NVIDIA and chip fabs to produce enough chips to match the buildout planned.
ThibWeb · · focus · HN ↗
CuriouslyC · · focus · HN ↗
rhyperior · · focus · HN ↗
cyanydeez · · focus · HN ↗
gunalx · · focus · HN ↗
epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
In the equilibrium, profits fall to zero in capitalism, but there's never equilibrium, everything is changing. Profit comes from insights that others haven't seen, from access to opportunities that others don't have, or through monopolistic control generating economic rents.
For that AI to make money, it has to have a harness that gives it one of the above things, which does seem possible.
swiftcoder · · focus · HN ↗
But strictly time-limited, because as soon as someone else figures out what you are doing, there's no moat to prevent them from telling their AI to do it too.
Markets reach equilibrium very fast when everyone has access to the exact same tools and information.