MIT Technology Review released a report examining how the artificial intelligence industry uses energy and estimating the energy cost of interacting with large-language-model services such as ChatGPT.
The report calculated that a response from large-language models can require between 114 joules and 6,706 joules, and it linked lower energy use to models with fewer parameters, which it said tend to produce less accurate answers.
The report also measured substantially higher energy use for AI-generated video. It found that generating a five-second video with a newer AI model used about 3.4 million joules, described as more than 700 times the energy required to generate a high-quality image, and compared this to running a microwave for over an hour.