Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
andymasley.substack.com
Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
1–10 of 337 posts
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#2If you use chatgpt somehow saves you from making one trip to the doctor in your car it can offset the entire year worth of chatgpt usage in terms of co2 impact.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#3The title does not match the content.
A more appropriate title is "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in comparison to everything else."
But, given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the article itself doesn't need to exist.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#4To me the "ChatGPT is destroying the environment "card always felt somewhat like bad faith arguing from the anti-AI crowd trying to find any excuse for being against AI. Like, the same people who complained about "using AI is destroying environment" seemed to have no issue with boarding a plane which would emit a bunch of CO2 so that they can have a vacation in Europe or the like. Selective environmentalism.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#5[dead]
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#6I mean.... doing most things are bad for the environment. Do less of everything that you don't need to.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#7The section on training feels weak, and that's what the discussion is mainly about.
Many companies are now trying to train models as big as GPT-4. OpenAI is training models that may well be even much larger than GPT-4 (o1 and o3). Framing it as a one-time cost doesn't seem accurate - it doesn't look like the big companies will stop training new ones any time soon, they'll keep doing it. So one model might only be used half a year. And many models may not end up used at all. This might stop at some point, but that's hypothetical.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#8This is a great article for discussion. However articles like this must link to references. It is one thing to assert, another to prove. I do agree that heating/cooling, car and transport use, and diet play massive roles in climate change that should not be subsumed by other debates.
The flip side to the authors argument is that LLMs are not only used by home users doing 20 searches a day. Governments and Mega-Corporations are chewing through GPU hours on god-knows-what. New nuclear and other power facilities are being proposed to power their use, this is not insignificant. Schneider Electric predicts 93 GW of energy spent on AI by 2028. https://www.powerelectronicsnews.com/schneider-electric-pred...
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#9Yeah, there are lots of things worse than LLMs. But, at least, they are useful and profitable.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#10what does "water used by data center" even mean? Does it consume the water somehow? What does it turn into? Steam? So uploading a 1GB file boils away nearly 1 liter of water? Or is it turned into bits somehow in some kind of mass to energy conversion? I sorta doubt that. Also this means data centers would have cooling towers like some power stations. Are we talking about the cooling towers of power stations?
I think at least that graph is complete non-sense. I will try and have chatGPT explain it to me.