Those things cost money. If it’s truly “massive amounts” then why are so many image generators giving it away for free?
I generate images locally on my home computer so I actually know how much energy and cooling is required per image, it’s really not that much. I’d use way more if I was making the image by hand in an image editing program.
That’s just nonsense they made up, or they are confusing their anti-AI memes.
An image generator uses no more power than a video game. Most run on consumer graphics cards.
LLMs are the ones that use a lot of resources but “massive amounts” is a vague term that has no useful meaning. No matter how you try to refute their statement, they can always just declare that they mean something else.
Generating the image does not take much power, though training them does; I should have been clearer.
When I say “massive amounts,” I mean a company like Microsoft opening large data centers that require enough energy and water to disrupt local communities. Obviously this isn’t an AI issue, and Microsoft doesn’t train for image generation AFAIK, but the fact remains that training an AI model requires an order of magnitude of more resources than most consumer or corporate applications.
If AI models were only getting more efficient, I wouldn’t worry about this, but companies tend to scale up and use more resources to make larger models.
And the same calculus applies to LLMs as to the image generators. If they’re so hideously expensive how is it that companies are giving access away for free? The goodness of their own hearts? Obviously they would like for people to pay for services and are using the LLMs as a loss leader, but they’re giving away so much in the way of LLM usage that I’ve never felt any need to pay for it myself. The average Joe isn’t their target market, the average Joe doesn’t have a big enough demand to be worth charging them for it.
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Those things cost money. If it’s truly “massive amounts” then why are so many image generators giving it away for free?
I generate images locally on my home computer so I actually know how much energy and cooling is required per image, it’s really not that much. I’d use way more if I was making the image by hand in an image editing program.
That’s just nonsense they made up, or they are confusing their anti-AI memes.
An image generator uses no more power than a video game. Most run on consumer graphics cards.
LLMs are the ones that use a lot of resources but “massive amounts” is a vague term that has no useful meaning. No matter how you try to refute their statement, they can always just declare that they mean something else.
Generating the image does not take much power, though training them does; I should have been clearer.
When I say “massive amounts,” I mean a company like Microsoft opening large data centers that require enough energy and water to disrupt local communities. Obviously this isn’t an AI issue, and Microsoft doesn’t train for image generation AFAIK, but the fact remains that training an AI model requires an order of magnitude of more resources than most consumer or corporate applications.
If AI models were only getting more efficient, I wouldn’t worry about this, but companies tend to scale up and use more resources to make larger models.
And the same calculus applies to LLMs as to the image generators. If they’re so hideously expensive how is it that companies are giving access away for free? The goodness of their own hearts? Obviously they would like for people to pay for services and are using the LLMs as a loss leader, but they’re giving away so much in the way of LLM usage that I’ve never felt any need to pay for it myself. The average Joe isn’t their target market, the average Joe doesn’t have a big enough demand to be worth charging them for it.