Show HN: LLMs consume 5.4x less mobile energy than ad-supported web search

duprat

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Hacker News

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Show HN: LLMs consume 5.4x less mobile energy than ad-supported web search.

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I think this misses most of what actually happens on a mobile device during a real search session.I built a parametric model of the full end-to-end mobile search session: 4G/5G radio energy, SoC rendering cost for a 2.5MB page, programmatic advertising RTB auctions running in the background, and network transmission costs for both sides.

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Then compared it to an equivalent LLM session.Main finding across 10,000 Monte Carlo draws: on mobile, a standard LLM session uses on average 5.4x less energy than a classic ad-supported web search session.

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Programmatic advertising alone accounts for up to 41% of device battery drain per session.Caveats I tried to be explicit about:- Advantage disappears on fixed Wi-Fi/fiber- Reverses for reasoning models- Parametric model, not empirical device measurement.

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Greenspector has offered to run terminal measurements for v2- Jevons paradox appliesSSRN working...

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