Comment by jjmarr
1 year ago
Food is extremely dense in energy. 1 food calorie is about 1.1 Watt-hours. A hamburger is about 490 Wh. An AI model requires 0.047 kWh = 47 Wh to generate 1000 text responses.[1] If an LLM could convert hamburgers to energy, it could generate over 10000 prompt completions on a single hamburger.
Based on my own experience, I would struggle to generate that much text without fries and a drink.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watt...
During that time, your brain would do far more than just that text generation though, beyond what we even know scientifically.
But yes, food energy could be useful for AI. A little dystopian potentially too, if you think about it. Like DARPA's EATR robot, able to run on plant biomass (although potentially animal biomass too, including human remains):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetically_Autonomous_Tacti...
AI is more energy-efficient than a human doing the same language-generation task is my point.