How much energy will AI really consume? The good, the bad and the unknown
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A lower bound estimate of energy consumption during image captioning by an LLM is 105 Wh per 1000 tasks.
“a lower bound estimate of energy consumption during image captioning by an LLM is 105 Wh per 1000 tasks performed”
From There is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence (2025) · cites this paper as Chen (2025)
Cites
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“As Chen (2025) reported, a lower bound estimate of energy consumption during image captioning by an LLM is 105 Wh per 1000 tasks performed.”
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- Authors
- Chen, S.
- Corresponding author
- Chen, Sophia
- ORCID
- Chen, Sophia
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2025-03-05
- Volume
- 639
- Issue
- 8053
- Pages
- 22-24
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W4408160654
- Cited by
- 78
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 45 · 2025: 33
- FWCI
- 17.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Electrical and Electronic Engineering › Green IT and Sustainability
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Hardware and Architecture › Energy Efficiency in Computing
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Keywords
- artificial intelligence energy consumption, electricity demand, corporate transparency, energy efficiency
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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