

I didn’t factor in mobile power usage as much in the equation before because it’s fairly negligible. However, I downloaded an app to track my phone’s energy use just for fun.
A mobile user browsing the fediverse would be using electricity around a rate of ~1 Watt (depends on the phone of course and if you’re using WiFi or LTE, etc.).
For a mobile user on WiFi:
In the 16 seconds that a desktop user has to burn through the energy to match those 2 prompts to chatGPT, that same mobile user would only use up ~0.00444 Wh.
Looking at it another way, a mobile user could browse the fediverse for 18min before they match the 0.3 Wh that a single prompt to ChatGPT would use.
For a mobile user on LTE:
With Voyager I was getting a rate of ~2 Watts.
With a browser I was getting a rate of ~4 Watts.
So to match the power for a single prompt to chatGPT you could browse the fediverse on Voyager for ~9 minutes, or using a browser for ~4.5 minutes.
I’m not sure how accurate this app is, and I didn’t test extensively to really nail down exact values, but those numbers sound about right.
I had to click to figure out just what an “AI Browser” is.
It’s basically Copilot/Recall but only for your browser. If the models are run locally, the information is protected, and none of that information is transmitted, then I don’t see a problem with this (although they would have to prove it with being open source). But, as it is, this just looks like a browser with major privacy/security flaws.
Reading into it a bit more:
Yeah, the part about sending my data of everything appearing on my browser window (passwords, banking, etc.) to some other computer for processing makes the other assurances worthless. At least they have plans to get everything running locally, but this is a hard pass for me.