Comment by IshKebab
11 hours ago
A billion tokens per day?? Plausible estimates put the energy use at about 0.001 Wh/token, which means you're using 1000 kWh/day in electricity, just to generate slop. That's about the same as 50-100 houses. 300kg of CO2 per day - roughly the same as flying from London to New York every three days.
I think on average AI energy usage is not as big a deal as everyone is panicking about, but your usage is truly absurd and I don't know how you can live with that. It's immoral.
That’s for i/o tokens, mostly output. 90-98% is cache read usually, so you can divide electricity use by 10 at least.
As for co2, it depends on the provider, it could be way lower as well.
As for ethics, you don’t know what he works on, and how effectively - he might be saving 10x that much of co2 for the planet.
I can't speak for that guy, but I'm a physicist and work in clean energy... So it's not too hard! That said, I usually am closer to 10M on days I do heavy coding, so not nearly that bad.
Terrifying to think that even physicists can't code their own simulations anymore. We're plunging headfirst into the dark ages.
Token caching is a thing
You really think OpenAI is selling $1500/mo of electricity (at $0.05/kwh) for $200/mo?
I’m guessing that Wh/token estimate is several orders of magnitude too high.
They certainly could be using that much electricity at a loss based on their profitability, which doesn’t exist.
Leaked financial documents from 2025 show the company reported an operating loss of approximately $20.9 billion against $13.1 billion in revenue.
As a company... but that includes things like research costs, model training etc. to determine if they're selling electricity at a loss you should look at inference costs bc that's the "thing" they're selling
1. You do not know what they're using it for. 2. Get off your high horse please. 3. Immoral my ass.
> Immoral my ass.
Is any amount of tokenmaxxing moral?
Is any form of energy usage moral?
I'm glad someone is voicing this. Overconsumption at that level is not defensible. However if they meant cached tokens so it's not that bad.
> just to generate slop
Do some people still deny you can do a shit ton of work with AI?
Most tokens are cached.
"slop"? come on. we're not in 2020 anymore, Dorothy.