Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

Such a stupid post, I know people on HN don’t like absolute descriptors like that and sorry for that.

Obviously the LLMs and ChatGPT don’t use the most energy when answering your question, they churn through insane amounts of water and energy when training them, so much so that big tech companies do not disclose and try to obscure those amounts as much as possible.

You aren’t destroying the environment by using it RIGHT NOW, but you are telling the corresponding company that owns the LLM you use “there is interest in this product”, en masse. With these interest indicators they will plan for the future and plan for even more environmental destruction.

if your use of chatgpt saves you from a trip to the doctor I would be very concerned

It's discomforting to me when people compare resource usage of ChatGPT, a computer, to the resource usage of a human being.

I've seen charts like this before that compare resource usage of people to corporations, implying corporations are the bigger problem. The implication here seems to be the opposite, and that tone feels just a little eugenicist.

~90% of the plastic debris in the ocean comes from ten rivers [0]. eight are in china/SEA. millions and billions of single-use items are sitting in warehouses and on store shelves wrapped in plastic. even before the plastic is discarded, the factories these items are produced in dump metric tons of waste into the oceans/soil with little repercussion.

point is, none of our "personal lifestyle decisions" - not eating meat, not mining bitcoin, not using chatgpt, not driving cars - are a drop in the bucket compared to standard practice overseas manufacturing.

us privileged folks could "just boycott", "buy renewable", "vote with your wallet", etc, but sales will move to a less developed area and the pollution will continue. this is not to say that the environment isn't important - it's critically important. it's just to say that until corporations are forced to do things the right way, it's ludicrous to point fingers at each other and worry that what we do day-to-day is destroying the planet.

[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368

Plenty of companies have revealed exactly how much energy and CO2 they have used training a model. Just off the top of my head, I've seen those numbers are available for Meta's Llama models, Microsoft's Phi series and DeepSeek's models - including their impressive DeepSeek v3 which trained for less than $6m in cost - a huge reduction compared to other similar models, and a useful illustration of how much more effect this stuff can get on the training side of things.