Speed highly correlates with power efficiency. I believe my hardware maxes out somewhere around 150W. 15 seconds of that isn't much at all.

> Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?

I presume that's mostly training, not inference. But in general anything that serves millions of requests in a small footprint is going to look pretty big.

> It could be a lot faster to take a helicopter to work everyday too, versus riding a bike.

Great analogy.

There's a billion users. Why do we make massive cities and factories and fields if humans only need 2000 calories a day