But if you're running it on your own hardware you might only generate tokens when you have something useful to do with them, instead of every time you load a Google search results page because Google decided the future is stuffing Gemini-generated answers down your eyeballs instead of letting you read it yourself from the primary source for 0.1 watts.

If LLM's were a mature product then this would be true at some point. However, you could argue (and I will) that the popularization of on-device LLM inference will lead to two things:

- Consumers of LLM inference (developers and hobbyists) will be more aware of compute cost, leading them to develop more token-efficient uses of LLM inference and be incentivized to pick the right model for the right job (instead of throwing Sonnet at the wall and follow up with Opus if that doesn't stick)

- A larger market for on-device (and therefore open weight) LLM's will probably result in more research concentrated on those inherently more efficient (because compute/memory-constrained) models.

I think that despite the inefficiencies, shifting the market towards local inference would be a net positive in terms of energy use. Remember that 50W might seem like a lot, but is still much less than what, let's say, a PS5 draws.

Also remember how AWS had the same promise and now we're just deploying stack after stack and need 'FinOps' teams to get us to be more resource-efficient?

Separate to the self-host/datacentre argument, it would be interesting to see a speed/performance/watts-per-token leaderboard between leading models. Which model is the most watt-efficient?

This is neither a controversial take nor a reason to prefer third-party hosting over self-hosting, so I don't think the internet really needs to be ready for it.

I thought this is a pretty generally accepted fact?

This is pretty much true for all applications.

There's a bunch of companies doing garage GPU datacenters now. Probably can act as a heat source during winter too if you have a heat pump.

Using only this dimension in a vacuum, it sounds like an easy choice, but we're extremely early in this market, and the big providers are already a mess of pricing choices, pricing changes, and sudden quota adjustments for consumers.

Plus, a Mac that's not running inference idles down to 1-5W, only drawing power when it needs to. Datacenters must maximize usage, individuals and their devices don't have to.

A Mac is also the rest of the personal computer!

There isn't a relationship between parameter size and energy use like that. You could run a 280B parameter model on a Raspberry Pi with a big SSD if you were so determined. The energy use would be small, but you would be waiting a very long time for your response.

Data center energy use isn't simple to calculate because servers are configured to process a lot of requests in parallel. You're not getting an entire GPU cluster to yourself while your request is being processed. Your tokens are being processed in parallel with a lot of other people's requests for efficiency.

This is why some providers can offer a fast mode: Your request gets routed to servers that are tuned to process fewer requests in parallel for a moderate speedup. They charge you more for it because they can't fit as many requests into that server.

Energy use for any given request is going to be roughly proportional to active parameters, not total. That would be something like 13B for Flash and 49B for Pro. So you'd theoretically get something like 190W if you could keep the same prefill and decode speed as Flash, which is unlikely.

Batching lowers that, since the model is read once from memory. Activation accumulation doesn't scale as nicely

Power isn't proportional to parameters. It may be vaguely proportional to tokens/s although batching screws that up.

Claude Sonnet is probably running on a 8 GPU box that consumes 10 kW while Opus might use more like 50 kW but that's shared by a bunch of users thanks to batching.

Power consumption numbers aren't useful for efficiency calculations without also considering the tokens per second for the same model and quantization.

I could write an engine that only uses 10W on your machine, but it wouldn't be meaningful if it was also 10X slower.

More power consumption is usually an indicator that the hardware is being fully utilized, all things equal (comparing GPU to GPU or CPU to CPU, not apples to oranges)

Most components have built in power measurement (although some are more accurate than others). Apps like Intel Power Gadget, Mx Power Gadget, Afterburner, Adrenalin, etc. can show power usage in real time.

True quantitatively, not qualitatively. DeepSeek V4 is not capable of doing what a human brain can do, of course, but for the tasks it can do, it can do it at a speed which is completely impossible for a human, so comparing the two requires some normalization for speed.