I've done a bit of research now, mainly based on Jegham et al. "How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference"
They list the energy consumption of DeepSeek-R1 (671B params) to be ~29 kW at 10k input token and 1.5k output token scales (Table 4). I think it is reasonable to expect current frontier models to at least match that since the models seem to have gotten larger and I think contexts are generally also larger in the use case we're considering (large chunks of GHC would have to get loaded into the context presumably). >From the same study, most datacenters use around 0.3 kg of CO2 equivalent per >kWh (Table 1), so DeepSeek R1 uses about 8.7 kgCO2e/h. That means using a single agent for ~400 hours is equivalent to a return flight from Austin Texas to Zurich (3500 kg CO2e; source: online tool), which I find an unjustifiable amount of emissions, but I guess some members of the community do already make such a trip once a year. I think this shows that it is likely that heavy use of LLMs causes significant emissions exceeding that of yearly transatlantic flights. Cheers, Jaro > On 27 Jul 2026, at 15:46, Tom Ellis via ghc-devs > <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 03:32:45PM +0200, Magnus Viernickel via ghc-devs > wrote: >> Technological improvements increasing the efficiency of a resource do not >> lead to a fall but to a rise in total consumption of that resources. >> >> That's a well-known effect. See e.g. >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. > > Yes indeed. I do not dispute that the amount of energy going into AI > usages is increasing both in relative and absolute terms. > >>> But how much? >> >> There are countless projections and surveys like the one shared by Andrei. >> We fortunately do not have to rely on bloggers with no considerable >> qualification in that area. > > That's good to hear, and I would welcome someone making a numeric > claim and backing it up with citations. I think that would be a > valuable contribution to the discussion here. > > To be clear: *I* am not trying to make a claim, nor refute someone > else's claim. I am pointing out that no such claim has been made > precise nor substantiated in this discussion! If someone believes > strongly that AI energy use should be factored into GHC's LLM policy > then the responsibility is theirs to make a precise and substantiated > claim. If claims about AI energy usage are not precise and > substantiated then I don't see why they should factor into the policy > decision. > > Tom > _______________________________________________ > ghc-devs mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > > _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
