this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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There was some previous discussion here, though you should take the linked article with a grain of salt as someone pointed out that the author of the article isn't exactly neutral.
https://discuss.online/post/32799122
The tl;dr is that it's hard to say for sure. It certainly takes energy to run services like chatgpt, but how much energy it takes vs other things that people don't blink at like eating meat or watching netflix is unclear. It's also very entangled with a conversation about how backwards we are in energy generation. The energy cost of responding to any particular query is going down as models get more efficient, though that doesn't mean overall energy use will go down, see Jevons paradox: