The Prompt's Address
Your year of prompting as a consumption line on a municipal account that does not exist. Converts ordinary AI usage into kilowatt-hours and household shares, with every contested coefficient shown as a range you can edit.
Sociable Systems · Calculator
The Prompt's Address
Your year of prompting is a consumption line on a municipal account that does not exist. This translates your usage into the terms that account would carry, and shows what the facility serving you was never asked on the record.
The energy of a single AI interaction is genuinely contested: estimates vary by model class and by study, so this calculator uses ranges and shows its coefficients, all editable. A number you cannot interrogate is not evidence. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Your usage
Replace with your city's figure; the default is an ordinary urban household.
Coefficients, editable, each with its basis
Published estimates for a single text exchange vary by an order of magnitude across model classes; the range is the honest form.
Image generation is heavier than a text exchange; published estimates cluster here.
The most contested line in this panel. Treat the output as a range, not a figure.
A standard household element; one hour at full draw.
One litre from room temperature.
Contested, and design-dependent: on a closed-loop facility the real figure is near zero. This line exists to be dismissed where it should be.
Your year, on the account that does not exist
If compute were a municipal account, this would be your consumption line, and the facility serving you would have an address you could look up, a draw figure you could read, and a decision record you could search. It has none of those. The prompt has no erf number. The arc this calculator belongs to is the argument that it should.
How to read this
- Ranges, not figures. Per-interaction energy is the most contested number in this field and the estimates vary by an order of magnitude. Anyone quoting a single figure is choosing an assumption and calling it a fact.
- This is not a guilt calculator. Efficiency is improving fast and usage is a reasonable thing to do. The subject of this page is the missing account, not the user.
- The account is the point. Every other consumption line in your life has an address, a meter and a record. Compute has an exabyte economy and no erf number.