Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment • Hacker News Board

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#31

Post by minimaxir » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

hexage1814 wrote: post #4

To 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.

It's less bad faith, more a meme that has become so prevalent that it's impossible to dispell as it's something too nuanced for social media. I've seen more than a few social media posts asking "do they really cut down a rainforest every time someone generates an AI image?"

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#32

Post by kaonwarb » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:15 AM UTC

yapyap wrote: post #13

changoplatanero wrote: post #2

If 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.

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

Early days, but not as crazy as it sounds: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

"The LLM alone scored 16 percentage points (95% CI, 2-30 percentage points; P = .03) higher than the conventional resources group."

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#33

Post by lioeters » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:16 AM UTC

pixelesque wrote: post #12

Sort of off-topic, but it does make one think about usage of compute (and the backing energy / resources required for that)... i.e. it doesn't seem too much of an exaggeration to say that we might be getting closer and closer to a situation where LLMs (or any other ML inference) is being run so much for so many different reasons / requests, that the usage does become significant in the future. Similarly, going into d…

That sounds like the opposite of data compression (inflation?) where the data size is increased before sending, then on receiving it is compressed back to a smaller form.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#34

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

blkhawk wrote: post #10

what 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…

> what does "water used by data center" even mean?

This doesn't clarify what exactly it includes, but there are two main things that generally are included:

(1) Direct water use for cooling, (which, yes, ends up as steam rom cooling towers), and

(2) Water used in generating electricity consumed by data centers, which, yeah, is again evaporated in cooling towers.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#35

Post by saagarjha » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

Liquix wrote: post #17

~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 m…

That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. Americans are about 15% of the world's emissions, of which 25% or so is transportation, of which well over half is cars. So you not driving to work is making direct impact on 2-3% of the world's overall emissions. Likewise, your decisions on all the other things, if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact on overall emissions.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#36

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:20 AM UTC

stonogo wrote: post #16

blkhawk wrote: post #10

what 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…

Yes, datacenters have cooling towers. There are lots of good articles about this topic. A good starting point is "water usage effectiveness" (WUE) which is one way this is tracked.

[deleted]

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#37

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:21 AM UTC

blkhawk wrote: post #22

stonogo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, datacenters have cooling towers. There are lots of good articles about this topic. A good starting point is "water usage effectiveness" (WUE) which is one way this is tracked.

The one near here just has heat exchanges. But even if all the others use evaporators then potential water usage is extremely misleading because its not like the water is consumed - its just temporarily unavailable. Also why doesn't uploading a 1GB file to my NAS boil a liter of water? are maybe all the switches and routers used between me and the datacenter water-cooled? I mean I can see such switches existing but I…

> The one near here just has heat exchanges. But even if all the others use evaporators then potential water usage is extremely misleading because its not like the water is consumed

Water consumption in all contexts is mostly fresh water returned from immediately usable form to either evaporation or the ocean. It is not "extremely misleading", because when it returns to immediately usable form by, e.g., precipitation, that's when new water is considered to be made available. The normal definitions are internally consistent and useful.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#38

Post by dwattttt » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:21 AM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #27

getwiththeprog wrote: post #8

This 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-Corpor…

> Governments and Mega-Corporations are chewing through GPU hours on god-knows-what. The "I don't know so it must be huge" argument?

Not knowing what it's being spent on is separate to knowing whether it's being spent

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#39

Post by nick__m » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:23 AM UTC

yapyap wrote: post #11

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 RI…

It's not like they are mixing that water with oil and pumping into the aquifer. Water evaporate, turn into clouds, that precipitate into rain that fall on the ground and water bodies, where it can be used again. So what's the problem, with datacenter water usage? Has the water cycle has stopped and I was not informed?

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#40

Post by scottcha » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 5:23 AM UTC

Yet we also see that hyperscale cloud emissions targets have been reversed due to AI investment, Datacenter growth is hitting grid capacity limits in many regions, and peaker plant and other non-renewable resources on the grid are being deployed more to handle this specific growth from AI. I think the author, by qualifying on "chatgpt" maybe can make the claims they are making but I don't believe the larger argument would hold for AI as a whole or when you convert the electricity use to emissions.

I'm personally on the side that the ROI will probably work out in the long run but not by minimizing the potential impact and keeping the focus on how we can make this technology (currently in its infancy) more efficient. [edit wording]