Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article says trading Gpt4 cost 284 tons of CO2, which is, in the scheme of things, quite small. Yearly emissions for a person in the US is ~16 tons, so /training/ the giant model is equivalent to the emissions of less than twenty people in a country of 400 million. Sure, every bit counts, but this is laughable as a criticism.
Just for some more perspective, a 747 outputs 12,500 tons of CO2 per year. So training GPT4 is basically of no major CO2 concern, especially when you consider how much CO2 it saves. Saves in the sense that humans no longer have to do the work, GPT-4 can just spit it out in seconds so no need for lights, computers to run, food to be produced for the human to eat, etc.
Except of course, now everyone is going to be doing the same thing as OpenAI, pretty much every day, until forever? We'll want to keep throwing hardware at the problem until who knows when and what happens.