• Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    I don’t understand these lines of headline. Where is that much power being consumed? I can probably generate a second video on my phone in a few seconds, and I doubt it’s using much more power than usual. Maybe the generation is happening elsewhere.

    If you put a Kill-a-Watt on the power cable coming into your PC at home, will you see a huge spike on power consumption when you generate something?

    • alphabethunter@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I find it unlikely that someone might be on Lemmy and not be aware about the basics of how ““AI”” actually works. But if you don’t know, truly, the rundown is that all of these AI apps you use are just an interface where you can make a request to an ““AI”” do something. The ““AI”” is not running on your computer. It’s like sending someone a message “hey, do this for me” and they will do it, and then saying you don’t feel tired after doing it.

      You can use a 15 year old pc or a top of the line gaming rig, then go to chatgpt website and request something, and the result would be the same, because it’s not your machine doing the work.

      Now, you can indeed run local AI on your machine, and if you try, you’d quickly see that you need beefy hardware and that your power use would spike like crazy to deliver results that are way slower than what you’d get from using an app/website. Which makes it obvious that they’re using stronger (more) hardware than you are, and, therefore, using way more energy than you are.

      • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        I find it unlikely that someone might be on Lemmy and not be aware about the basics of how ““AI”” actually works.

        That feels unnecessarily aggressive?

        I don’t really use it because I don’t like it, so I haven’t bothered to read much about it. I tried some local stable diffusion image generation and it didn’t seem to strain my gaming computer much. I don’t have a power measuring device.

        I tried stuff like Claude which I know is running remotely, and I assumed Gemini is remote since Google wouldn’t pass up a chance to exfiltrate more of my data.

      • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        I tried a few different free apps rather than the official apps of one of the ai vendors. I guess I assumed that most of them were doing their thinking locally but I never tried on airplane mode.

        I did caveat my top level comment.

        Maybe the generation is happening elsewhere.