[TobTobXX]

Wrong. In the article:

> Training GPT-4 used 50 GWh of energy. Like the 20,000 households point, this number looks ridiculously large if you don’t consider how many people are using ChatGPT.

> Since GPT-4 was trained, it has answered (at minimum) about 200,000,000 prompts per day for about 700 days. Dividing 50GWh by the total prompts, this gives us 0.3Wh per prompt. This means that, at most, including the cost of training raises the energy cost per prompt by 10%, from 10 Google searches to 11. Training doesn’t add much to ChatGPT’s energy cost.

https://andymasley.substack.com/i/162196004/training-an-ai-m...

[JohnKemeny]

Just because you divide a number by a lot to get a small number doesn't make the original number smaller.

Those are 200M/d prompts that wouldn't happen without the training.

[TobTobXX]

> Just because you divide a number by a lot to get a small number doesn't make the original number smaller.

A bus emits more CO2 than a car. Yet it is more friendly to the environment because it transports more people.

> Those are 200M/d prompts that wouldn't happen without the training.

Sure, but at least a few millions are deriving value from it. We know this because they pay. So this value wouldn't have been generated without the investment. That's how economics work.

[warkdarrior]

Those 200M/d prompts would be replaced with some other activities to solve the same problems. So if training did not happen, maybe instead of 200M/d prompts, you'd have 200M/d trips to the local library, using 200M cars to each drive three miles.