Microsoft is launching a set of capabilities in Windows today that will start to weave AI features into regular Windows 11 PCs, instead of consumers having to buy a special Copilot Plus PC. The biggest change is that Microsoft thinks people will want to talk to their computers and have Copilot take actions on their behalf.
Remind me how much water and electricity each ai query consumes?
I just checked an article on it I remember reading recently, 0.24 watt-hours of electricity and 0.26 milliliters of water for the median prompts. I’ll be generous and assume average is equivalent to median (it would be higher) and that by hundreds of millions they only mean two of them. That’s still 48,000,000 watt-hours of electricity and 52000 liters of water wasted every day on stuff people were doing just fine without ai being shoved in our faces. For a bit of comparison, that’s the amount of electricity consumed by 4 full households in an entire year on average, and to be clear my estimate was being extremely generous to the ai.
Just to make it bleaker… like 80% of these requests are “Please turn on a lightbulb.” And could absolutely be handled without a whiff of AI.
That’s the future of AI. Why flick a switch when you can slurp up as much power as a mid-sized town and have it done for you? /s
Picard: Computer, lights! Jordy: Captain! We’re dropping out of warp for some reason…