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.