I haven't been closely following the releases of new models and the research papers that sometimes go along with them. So I was wondering: is power consumption ever seriously talked about by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others? Do we get some specific numbers of how much power their models actually consume to produce 100 tokens? The cost of training some of these models? Or we're not yet at that stage yet and nobody cares and at best we can just get really rough estimates based on "trust me bro" tweets by their respective CEO's?

Some time ago, I came across this post. GPT-OSS (2OB, 120B) are meager, yet energy efficient models and I was surprised that the power consumption is still larger than what I had estimated before.

For 120B to generate a 1000 tokens (which is really not a lot) it would take up around 83 Wh of electricity. For context my PC consumes ~100Wh when idling. So it's almost equivalent as leaving my PC on for an hour. Considering that proprietary models are TRILLIONS of parameters and probably not as energy efficient the true power consumption of these models is concerning. Of course, these big data centers do a lot of things to maximize the efficiency that this "test" fails to do. But even if you half the energy consumption it's still significant given their size and their pervasiveness in handling everyday, trivial tasks.

I haven't come across similar posts or studies for newer open source models, so if somebody has, please share.

Also, I don't seem to fully understand how does context size fit into all of this. The larger the context size the more power it would take to produce those 100 tokens?

Spouse and I are trying to get bids from local solar installers and we'd appreciate some crowdsourced knowledge from Tilderinos. Questions first, then some context...

• In the current market, is "no, your equipment can't talk to the Internet" actually an unreasonable demand?
• Is there a term or phrase we should be using to look for, or guide installers towards, solar setups that fully function without Internet access?
• Are there any equipment types -- microinverters, for example -- that definitely will not work due to architecture?
• Are there battery controllers, or central inverters, that are known to play nicely (read: can be expanded later) with batteries from other manufacturers?

For each installer, we start the conversation with "it's essential that the system work entirely offline, without Internet." We're flexible on nearly everything else: system size (probably ~15kW), number of panels, battery, etc. Our first concern is making sure that a 25-year investment is not dependent on some company's cloud servers; secondly, that we're not inverting our dependency graph by making our electric power reliant on the whims of our ISP. There's also the privacy angle. But we're not looking for a totally off-the-grid setup, just trying not to lock ourselves into a bad purchase.

So far, one third of the installers (3/9) have immediately told us we're unreasonable and to just go away. Two others said "sure!" and ghosted us afterwards. One was a little more forthcoming, saying that the equipment requires periodic connections to the manufacturer for monitoring and they couldn't provide a warranty without it. The last two provided bids, but it's difficult to tell if they're telling the truth given the conflicting info we've seen.

For context, I live in the tropics and get a lot of sunlight for most of the year outside of monsoon season.

I was recently chatting with some coworkers and one of the mentioned baking cookies on their dashboard during the summer, and I remember my brother mentioning doing that when he lived in Arizona. That is something I could probably do here, but we always keep a sunshade up in our car so it isn't incredibly hot when we get inside.

This got me thinking about solar ovens since I remember seeing a video of someone using one to cook online awhile ago, and I was curious if anyone here has one or has any experience using one and if it was worth it or if they would have any recommendations.