To COP31: Your Prompts Are Packing Away an Electric Bill

TL;DR: Asking a question to a LLM requires about the same amount of energy it takes to power a 10 watt LED bulb for two minutes. The problem isn’t our prompts, it’s how we use them. Becoming habituated to over-serving our model of choice (“whatever you do, don’t let it be small”), mindlessly creating prompts, asking unnecessarily verbose questions, or iteratively paraphrasing your questions until you receive the “correct” answer can multiply your energy consumption by up to 38x. Here are some potential solutions I came up with after looking at published datasets. Read All