Comment on Epic’s AI Darth Vader tech is about to be all over Fortnite

• Vodulas@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Sorry, I said “no” because it is clearly not just 6 year olds playing fortnite and interacting with the bots, but did not elaborate at all. Brain fart on my part

  If the number of video cards running Fortnite weren’t cause for worry 3 years ago, why would this use of AI be concerning today?

  Because it has the potential to be way worse, but it depends heavily on actual energy usage, which we don’t have in this case. What we do have is estimates on ChatGPT, and the estimates are pretty bad

  web.archive.org/…/energy-ai-use-electricity-water…

  We can only speculate, but if 100 words of text takes .14kWh we can assume 100 words of voice production is worse.

  And maybe if the novelty does not stick it is not something to be concerned about, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be asking about the energy cost

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  • MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I think it’s fair to discuss the energy. I’m not sure where the math comes from that 100 words takes .14kWh. My video card uses 120W pegged and can generate 100 words in let’s say a nice round 2 minutes. So that works out to 4W or .004kWh. But of course they are running much more advanced and hungry models, and this is probably generating the text and then generating the voice, and I don’t know what that adds. I do know that an AI tool I use added a voice tool and it added nothing to cost, so it was small enough for them to eat, but also the voices are eh and there are much better voice models out there.

    So that’s fine, I can pretty well define the lower bounds of what a line of text could cost, energy-wise. But this strategy doesn’t get us closer to an actual number. What might be helpful… is understanding it from EA’s perspective. They are doing this to increase their bottom line through driving customer engagement and excitement, because I haven’t heard anything about this costing the customer anything.

    So whatever the cost is of all the AI they are using, has to be small enough for them to simply absorb in the name of increased player engagement leading to more purchases. The number I just found is $1.2 billion in profit annually. Fuck, that’s a lot of money. What do you think they might spend on this? Do you think it would be as high as 2%? I’ll be honest, I really don’t know. So lets say they are going to spend $24million on generative AI and let’s just assume for a second that all goes to power.

    I just checked and the average for 1KWh nationally is $0.1644 but let’s cut that in half assuming they cut some good deals? (I’m trying to be completely fair in these numbers so disagree if you like. I’m writing this before doing all the math so I don’t even know where this is going.) That looks like about 291 million KWh (or… that’s just 291 GWh, right?)

    I read global energy usage is estimated at 25,500 TWh, and check my math that works out to about 1/87,000th of the world’s annual electricity consumption. Kinda a lot for a single game, but it’s pretty popular.

    But the ask is how that compares to video cards and… let’s be honest this is going to be a very slippery, fudge-y number. I was quoted 1.5 million daily players (and I see other sources report up to 30 million which is really wide, but lets go with the lower number). So the question is, how long do they play on average, and how much power do their video cards use? I see estimates of 6-10 hours per week and 8-10 hours per week. Let’s make it really easy and assume 7 hours per week or 1 hour per day.

    I have a pretty low end video card, but it’s probably still comparable to or better than some of the devices connecting to fortnight. I don’t have a better number to use, so I’m going to use 120W. There should be a lot of players higher than that, but also probably a lot of switches and whatnot that are probably lower power. Feel free to disagree.

    So 1.5m players x 1 hour per day = 120MWh x 365 = 43.8GWh.

    By these numbers the AI uses about 6x the power of the GPUs. So there is that. But also I think I have been extremely generous with these numbers everywhere except maybe the video card wattage which I really don’t have any idea how to estimate. Would EA spend 2% expecting to recoup that in revenue? What if it’s 1%? What if it’s .5%? At .5% they are getting pretty close.

    Or if the number of daily players is 15 million instead of 1.5, that alone is enough to tip the scale the other way.

    And device power is honestly a wild-ass guess. You could tell me the average is 40W or 250W and I’d have no real basis to argue.

    If you have any numbers or suggestions to make any of this more accurate, I’m all ears. The current range of numbers would lean toward me being wrong, but my confidence in any of this is low enough that I consider the matter unresolved.

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    • Vodulas@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It is super tough to get more than a ballpark for sure. The 1.4 million players from average daily players over the past year. 30 million is the all time peak, I believe.

      As far as how much Epic/Disney is willing to spend, that is another grey area. Do they consider this marketing? Do they consider this a test bed for AI generated actors for shows and movies? The motivation and how much they are willing to spend is even more opaque than the energy use numbers

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