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pmontratoday at 7:03 AM0 repliesview on HN

100 W is only the start. Let's say that I consume 100 W all along the day. I use an LLM for coding assistance in the old way of asking questions and copy pasting code. It's much faster than me at writing that code. I don't think it ever works 1 hour for me per day. It's probably 10 cumulative minutes, probably much less. Round it up to 12 minutes to make it 1/5 of a hour or round it down to 6 minutes for a 1/10. So instead of 24 it's 0.1 hours, 240 times less. Those 100 W could be 24000 W and the total power per day would be the same. Is that LLM consuming 24 kW when working for me? No idea but I hope it's less than that.

Of course I could do all of my coding alone again, but I would be slower. It's like walking to the mall several times per week, several hours per time, instead of once or twice per week with a car, three cumulative hours. I trade a higher energy consumption for more time to do other things and the ability to live far away from shops.