Stanford's Joules-to-GDP framework ranks AI models by economic value per joule

AIStanford researchers introduce Joules-to-GDP, a framework that measures the dollar value of AI work minus running cost per joule of energy. Across 220 GDPval tasks in 44 occupations, Gemma 4 31B delivers 56% of GLM 5.2's net value with 23% of the energy.

Rohan Paul

@rohanpaul_ai

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New Stanford paper finds that a smaller AI model can return far more economic value per unit of energy than the most capable one.

Now that the world is limited by energy/power, how much energy each AI task burns should indeed by studied.

Here, the researchers built Joules-to-GDP, which measures the dollar value of an AI's work, minus its running cost, per joule of energy used. They tested 5 open models on 220 professional tasks from GDPval, covering 44 occupations.

GLM 5.2 produced the most net value per task, but Gemma 4 31B got 56% of it with 23% of the energy.

Moving Qwen3.6-27B from 1 to 8 H100s cut task time by just 22% while using 3.2x the energy.

GPT-OSS 120B used 68% less energy than GLM 5.2 despite nearly the same price and speed.

Running the same model on 8 H100 chips instead of 1 made tasks only 22% faster but used 3.24x the energy, for nearly the same dollar value of work

https://x.com/jonsaadfalcon/status/2118079242340814896/video/1

Jon Saad-Falcon@JonSaadFalcon

AI is using more and more of the world’s energy. But how much economic value are we getting from AI? We’re introducing Joules-to-GDP (J2G), a framework that measures how well AI turns energy into economic value and shows which tasks, models, and hardware give the best return. Across 44 occupations in finance, engineering, law, administrative work, and more in @OpenAI's GDPval, we arrive at three findings: 1) The tasks with the highest economic value are not the tasks with the highest economic value per joule. For example, CAD design earns ~10% more per task than building websites, but the latter earns ~27% more value per joule. 2) The most powerful model isn’t always the best use of energy. Gemma 4 31B delivers 56% of GLM 5.2’s net value with 23% of the energy, for 2.5x the value per joule. 3) More chips don’t guarantee proportionate returns. Moving the same model from 1 to 8 NVIDIA H100s uses 3.2x the energy but cuts completion time by only 22%, with about the same value. With @SnorkelAI, we’re also releasing GDPWorks, a benchmark for economically valuable tasks across 36 additional occupations. Joint work co-led by @amirzeinaalii and @Avanika15, with @Mersad_Abbasi, @Jon_Hartley_, John Hennessy, @HazyResearch, and @Azaliamirh. More details below 🧵

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Rohan Paul · x.comPublished Nov 4, 4:29 PM ET · added here 4:52 PM ET

Original title: New Stanford paper finds that a smaller AI model can return far more economic value per unit of energy than the most capable one.

Stanford's Joules-to-GDP framework ranks AI models by economic value per joule

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