Comment by bcye
Reminder that LLMs only(?) consume energy on the order of a few seconds of Netflix[1].
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2...
Reminder that LLMs only(?) consume energy on the order of a few seconds of Netflix[1].
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2...
They claim that streaming over WiFi to a single mobile device is 37W:
Because phones are extremely energy efficient, data transmission accounts for nearly all the electricity consumption when streaming through 4G, especially at higher resolutions (Scenario D). Streaming an hour-long SD video through a phone on WiFi (Scenario C) uses just 0.037 kWh – 170 times less than the estimate from the Shift Project.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/carbon-footprint-net...
It's way more lopsided than your example would suggest.
My understanding is that Netflix can stream 100 Gbps from a 100W server footprint (slide 17 of [0]). Even if you assume every stream is 4k and uses 25 Mbps, that's still thousands of streams. I would guess that the bulk of the power consumption from streaming video is probably from the end-user devices -- a backbone router might consume a couple of kilowatts of power, but it's also moving terabits of traffic.
[0] https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf
Does the Netflix number include the energy cost of manufacturing all the cameras/equipment used for production? Energy for travel for all the crew involved to the location? Energy for building out the sets?
It's quickly pointed out that he's not counting the training of models, producing all the GPUs, energy spent on scraping, the increased storage needs from scraping the whole internet, etc.
The Netflix number is probably not counting all the energy spent producing the shows/movies, building all the cameras/specialized equipment, building their data centers etc. either.
It is fair to compare inference to streaming. Both are done by the end user.
Netflix spending 240Wh for 1h of content just does not pass the smell test for me.
Today I can have ~8 people streaming from my Jellyfin instance which is a server that consumes about 35W, measured at the wall. That's ~5Wh per hour of content from me not even trying.