Energy claims for efficient neural networks are often inferred from operation counts. We report direct GPU energy measurements on two workloads that batch very differently, recurrent policies in GPU-vectorised multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models, and ask one question of both: can the rows of a batch be made to share computation, across the batch and over time, at a measured saving? On recurrent policies the answer so far is no. Shared activity patterns exist but rarely last one step, masking a frozen policy fails, and trained-in masks succeed only because a fixed mask is equivalent to a narrow GRU, at 11x the energy of a small dense policy in our implementation. Test-time steering adds nothing beyond re-picking on either workload. On MoE models the answer is yes, and granularity decides how much: on Qwen3-30B-A3B, batch-aware routing reads 25-31% fewer expert weights within KL 0.05, with benchmark changes within noise at 500 items, and uses 12-18% less energy per token on a fused forward. We also introduce persistence-aware OEA, a one-parameter rule that keeps the batch-aware cut with about 40% fewer new experts per step than native routing at batch 32-64, though its energy has not yet been measured. These are pilot measurements on one GPU type, and we state their limits.
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