this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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Watt is not an energy unit.
it’s about energy transfer though. transfer of titty whats to watts to my mind.
That’s just science
Its continuous to keep the image active in your mind :)
That'd need watt hours though. Meme is only showing the instantaneous power required to conjure the image for an infinitesimal amount of time - you cant do any useful 'work' with it unless the time is accounted for. Watt seconds maybe.
What makes me skeptikal of this data though is that the correct sciencing term for a billion watts is the well established 'jiggawatt'. In this context I'd have also accepted the Canadian spelling 'jigglewatt'.
not "infinitesimal time." continuously. think of it like this: to continuously think up perky tits, it takes a human mind 12 watts- brain is a 12 watt computer. time interval is proportional to the number of titty images/length of titty video. and im psure an individual instance of titty ai doesn't come out to 2.7 jigglewatts- im like 80% sure i can get a (small) titty generator to run on my lil 50 watt phone. not testing that assumption today tho.
Are watt seconds not joules
yes, which is what you'd measure to compare the energy efficiency of completing a job.
Yeah no. Imagine it like a computer and screen. To render an image it will momentarily consume a bit more power, but as soon as it has been rendered it will still continuosily consume a stable amount of x Watt to keep running and displaying the picture. For continuous stable operation of something with no specified time, Watt is the correct unit.
People say this, but almost every time the time interval is left off it's hours.
Either way, the numbers in this meme are clearly made up. Most image generation uses fewer than 10 watt hours.
This is new for me. Must be some engineering thing. I'm a physicist and and I feel guilty if I leave out some units just because, lol.
Maybe it's comparing the total power rating of the brain to a data center dedicated to AI
Which is also a stupid comparison because the data cenrer will be processing a lot of parallel requests. That's why you want the unit to be energy rather than power in this case
Or maybe it's all made up.
I think it's all made up. The most power hungry data center in the world consumes 150MW of power, and that's from a massive 11 million square foot facility in China that's significantly larger than any other data center.
EDIT: an hour of heavy thinking does consume approximately 12 watt hours though, so that figure seems reasonable.
Watt would you suggest?
That's, like, your opinion, man.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt
No
🦗
And the text dosnt specify a time interval, whats your point?
That watts by themselves mean nothing with regard to energy consumption.
Also, it literally is an energy unit used in measurements. It's meant as a continious power. Ie. Your active imagination consumes around 12 watts of power, not "rendering one image"
That's power, not energy.
And what is power?
Power is energy per unit of time. Energy is power over a period of time. A lightning strike is about 1 GJ of energy. But it happens in a split second, so the power is far higher, say 100 GW. That is the output of 100 nuclear power plants. But only for 0.01 seconds.
TNT is even more extreme. It can detonate in microseconds, so release its energy in a fraction of a millisecond. 1 kg contains about 4 MJ of energy, released in about 10 microseconds, a power of about 300 GW. That is about as much power as all of the USA combined needs.
You are off by a factor of ~250, it's 1.21 Gigawatts
Ah damn you got me there...
Thanks.