So basically running a microwave for about 800 seconds, or a bit more than 13 minutes per model?

Oh my god - the world is gonna end. Too bad, we panicked because of exaggerated energy consumption numbers for using an LLM when doing individual work.

Yes - when a lot of people do a lot of prompting, these 0ne tenth of a second to 8 seconds of running the microwave per prompt adds up. But I strongly suggest, that we could all drop our energy consumption significantly using other means, instead of blaming the blog post's author about his energy consumption.

The "lot of burned coal" is probably not that much in this blog post's case given that 1 kWh is about 0.12 kg coal equivalent (and yes, I know that we need to burn more than that for 1kWh. Still not that much, compared to quite a few other human activities.

If you want to read up on it, James O'Donnell and Casey Crownhart try to pull together a detailed account of AI energy usage for MIT Technology Review.[1] I found that quite enlightening.

[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

Between $3k and $30k to solve a single ARC-AGI problem [1]. Not sure if "100 runs" makes this comparable.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/02/openais-o3-model-might-be-...

And how do you know what the purely-human-driven energy expenditure would have been?

How much longer would OP have needed to find the same vulnerability without LLM help? Then multiply that by the energy used to produce 2000kcal/day of food as well as the electricity for running their computer.

Usually LLMs come out far ahead in those types of calculations. Compared to humans they are quite energy efficient