> Imagine halving the resource costs of AI and what that could mean for the planet and the industry -- based on extreme estimates such savings could reduce the total US power usage by over 10% by 2030
The way this is phrased threw me off. It sounded to me like the author was comparing the power use of a more efficient LLM industry to US usage without LLMs and expecting it to be 10% lower.
Looking into the source linked with the claim, it doesn't even hold up when compared against how much power LLMs use today. The linked article raises an estimate that LLM power use could increase 15-23 times between 2023 and 2027, and that by 2030 LLMs could account for 20-25% of our total energy use.
Working that match backwards, the benefit the author is hailing as a success is that we would only increase energy use by say 7.5-11.5 times by 2027 and that in 2030 LLMs would only be 10% of the total energy use. That's not a win in my book, and doesn't account for the Jevan's Paradox problem where we would almost certainly just use all that efficiency gain to further grow LLM use compared to the 2030 prediction without the efficiency gains.
The way this is phrased threw me off. It sounded to me like the author was comparing the power use of a more efficient LLM industry to US usage without LLMs and expecting it to be 10% lower.
Looking into the source linked with the claim, it doesn't even hold up when compared against how much power LLMs use today. The linked article raises an estimate that LLM power use could increase 15-23 times between 2023 and 2027, and that by 2030 LLMs could account for 20-25% of our total energy use.
Working that match backwards, the benefit the author is hailing as a success is that we would only increase energy use by say 7.5-11.5 times by 2027 and that in 2030 LLMs would only be 10% of the total energy use. That's not a win in my book, and doesn't account for the Jevan's Paradox problem where we would almost certainly just use all that efficiency gain to further grow LLM use compared to the 2030 prediction without the efficiency gains.