this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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I call bullshit. Stable Diffusion XL has energy footprint of about 0.29 watt hours per image while generating. That is roughly equivalent to running a 0.5 Watt energy LED light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes. Even for training the costs are not that extreme. Stable Diffusion needed 150,000 GPU hours. At 300 Watt for an A100 at full load that would 45,000 kWh. This roughly the energy neeed to drive an electric car for 180,000 miles, which is a lot, but still on a reasonable scale.
Okay, but corpos aren't training one model and being done with it. They're training thousands of models, tweaking hyperparameters to find the correct fine tuning needed.
Also, putting the scale at 180,000 miles of driving makes it sound more insane to me. The earth is like 25,000 miles. If you could drive on the ocean, you could circumnavigate the globe seven times over!
Yeah but only with a fairly efficient EV in the TESLA model 3 class. With a typical gasoline car you'd be closer to only one and half circumnaviagtions with 45.000 kWh. The average american car can apparently drive 25 Miles per Gallon. A gallon of gas has roughly 33 kWh of energy in it. That's only 34090 miles on the energy used train stable diffusion.
You aren't making it sound bettter 34,000 miles is still a lot of miles.
That's a fraction of the life of a single car, for an AI model used by millions of people. AI isn't that big of an energy consumer if done right it seems. Look at how much energy data centers used before the AI shenanigans, or how much Bitcoin uses.