"AI for everyone would cost a tenth of a kettle a day

A personal write-up of a Pause AI panel in Edinburgh argues that giving every UK adult about 30 text prompts a day would use roughly 0.2 TWh a year, around 0.07% of UK electricity, while heavy video generation and data-centre build-out carry the real energy and land costs. The author concludes that freezing or nationalising today's models would lock in inefficiency, and that the UK should host good open models on its own compute rather than build a frontier model.