It's wasteful. If someone built a clock out of 47 microservices that called out to 193 APIs to check the current time, location, time zone, and preferred display format we'd rightfully criticize it for similar reasons.
In a world where Javascript and Electron are still getting (again, rightfully) skewered for inefficiency despite often exceeding the performance of many compiled languages, we should not dismiss the discussion around efficiency so easily.
But I presume you light up Christmas lights in December, drive to the theater to watch a movie or fire up a campfire on holiday.
That too is "wasteful". It's not needed, other, or far more efficient ways exist to achieve the same. And in absolute numbers, far more energy intensive than running an LLM to create 9 clocks every minute. We do things to learn, have fun, be weird, make art, or just spend time.
Now, if Rolex starts building watches by running an LLM to drive its production machines or if we replace millions of wall clocks with ones that "Run an LLM every second", then sure, the waste is an actual problem.
Point I'm trying to make is that it's OK to consider or debate the energy use of LLMs compared to alternatives. But that bringing up that debate in a context where someone is creative, or having a fun time, its not, IMO. Because a lot of "fun" activities use a lot of energy, and that too isn't automatically "wasteful".
What I find amusing with this argument is that, no one ever brought power savings when e.g. used "let me google that for you" instead of giving someone the answer to their question, because we saw the utility of teaching others how to Google. But apparently we can't see the utility of measuring the oversold competence of current AI models, given sufficiently large sampling size.
60x24x30 = 40k AI calls per month per model. Let's suppose there are 1000 output tokens (might it be 10k tokens? Seems like a lot for this task). So 40m tokens per model.
The price for 1m output tokens[0] ranges from $.10 (qwen-2.5) to $60 (GPT-4). So $4/mo for the cheapest, and $2.5k/mo for the most expensive.
So this might cost several thousand dollars a month? Something smells funny. But you're right, throttling it to once an hour would achieve a similar goal and likely cost less than $100/mo (which is still more than I would spend on a project like this).
