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.
My guy. That is over 15 years of daily driving and the occasional long haul trip, 1.5x the average lifespan of an EV. Consumed in under 2 years. For ONE iteration of ONE AI model. Nevermind how many thousands of people are running that "light bulb for slightly less than 35 minutes" every second, with the vast majority of what it spits out not even being used for anything of value except to tell the prompt writer what they need to tweak in order to get their perfect anime waifu out of it.
Still not much on an industrial scale. For example, you can compare it to the aviation industry. There are roughly 550 transatlantic flights per day and each one consumes about 5000kg of fuel per hour for 6 to 10 hours straight. A kg of jet A1 has roughly 11 kWh. So a single transatlantic flight consumes roughly 385,000 kWh of energy. So training one model still consumes a lot less energy than a single one of the 550 transatlantic flights daily.
Not sure why people rip on commercial air travel so much.
Some "back of the napkin math here".
A380 can hold 84,545 gallons of fuel, and has a range of 9200 miles, giving it a fuel economy of roughly 0.1MPG...
Except it can carry 853 people at a time. At 1/3rd capacity, it exceeds the average fuel economy per person per mile than a car with a single person in it in the US. (26mpg). At full capacity it's around 85 mpg/person.
Oh good job, you found another thing we need to reduce!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism