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Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

andymasley.substack.com

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Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#71

Post by wmf »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #60
scottcha wrote: post #40

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…

Is that true though? Data centers can be placed anywhere in the USA, they could be placed near a bunch of hydro or wind farm resources in the western grid which has little coal anyways outside of one line from Utah to socal. The AI doesn’t have to be located anywhere near to where it is used since fiber is probably easier to run than a high voltage power line.

That was already done years ago and people are predicting that the grid will be maxed out soon.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#72

Post by devmor »

maeil wrote: post #7

The 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 use…

I am sure that’s intentional, because this article is the same thing we see from e/acc personalities any time the environmental impact is brought up.

Deflection away from what actually uses power and pretending the entire system is just an API like anything else.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#73

Post by strogonoff »

simonw wrote: post #56
strogonoff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised if many people said it is unethical to use LLMs like ChatGPT for environmental reasons, as opposed to ethical principles such as encouraging unfair use of IP and copyright violation. Still, LLM queries are not made equal. The environmental justification does not take into account for models querying other services, like the famous case where a single ChatGPT query resulted in thousands of HTTP re…

I see people complaining that ChatGPT usage is unethical for environmental reasons all the time. Here's just the first example I found from a Bluesky search (this one focuses on water usage): https://bsky.app/profile/theferocity.bsky.social/post/3lfckq... "the famous case where a single ChatGPT query resulted in thousands of HTTP requests" Can you provide more information about that? I don't remember gearing about th…

> Can you provide more information about that?

Sure, I looked it up and it was a security advisory: https://github.com/bf/security-advisories/blob/main/2025-01-...

I don’t have the time to re-read it now so if I am misremembering and it is a training-time effect rather than query-time effect then my bad, though the point largely stands.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#74

Post by starspangled »

irishloop wrote: post #44
saagarjha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.

Not encouraging population growth everywhere but particularly in the highest per-capita consuming and polluting countries, but rather allow them to naturally level off and even gradually decline would go a much longer way. It would enable significant emissions reductions and reduction in all other environmental impacts of consumption without impacting quality of life.

Eating bugs and living in pods sounds great and all, but if the end result is just allowing the ruling class to pack more drones and consumers in like sardines then it's not really solving anything.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#75

Post by seanmcdirmid »

wmf wrote: post #71
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true though? Data centers can be placed anywhere in the USA, they could be placed near a bunch of hydro or wind farm resources in the western grid which has little coal anyways outside of one line from Utah to socal. The AI doesn’t have to be located anywhere near to where it is used since fiber is probably easier to run than a high voltage power line.

That was already done years ago and people are predicting that the grid will be maxed out soon.

Build new data centers near sources of power, and grid capacity isn’t going to be a problem. Heck, American industry used to follow that (building garment factories on fast moving rivers before electricity was much of a thing, Boeing grew up in the northwest due to cheap aluminum helped out by hydro). Why is AI somehow different from an airplane?

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#76

Post by hmottestad »

idle_zealot wrote: post #66
saagarjha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Driving to work" is hardly a "vote with your wallet" style consumer choice. Our housing, building, and transportation policies have been geared towards encouraging car-dependence for nearly a century. In places with better public transit and bike lanes, people spontaneously choose to use those modes of transport. Just like with companies dumping as much plastic waste/CO2 as they can get away with, this is a policy p…

Regular voting is usually what affects things such as the transportation infrastructure in your country or city. It’s a slow proceed though.

Here in Oslo there has been a lot of investment in bike lanes, but just because one part of the local government builds more bike lanes doesn’t mean that other parts of the government will follow suit. Police still doesn’t care about cars illegally blocking the bike lanes. The people ploughing snow see bike lanes as the last thing that should need ploughing, preferably no earlier than 2 weeks after it snowed. A dedicated bike path I use to work is supposed to be ploughed within 2 hours of snow, but it took a week before anything was done and now three weeks later it’s still not to the standard that the government has set.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#77

Post by drawfloat »

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.

Who is this person you’re constructing? Being concerned about plane emissions and travel is an incredibly common thing and people are adjusting their lifestyles accordingly - lots of overnight sleeper train lines are reopening due to demand.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#78

Post by jhanschoo »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #57
irishloop wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.

Right just a little bit of restraint. On an unprecedented scale of coordination by hundreds of millions to billions of people - a scale of cooperation that has probably never occurred in human history (and there's no reason to believe it will any time soon). But sure, if people "just" did a "little", it would go a long way. Just a _little_ restraint from the entire population all at once in perpetuity. No big deal.

There are mechanisms for such coordination. Diets have shifted around the world to more McD's, more western cuisine. Wild catch changes all the time as we overfish stocks to endangerment.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#79

Post by minimaxir »

strogonoff wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question this is addressing concerns personal use. Is it ethical to use ChatGPT on a personal basis? A surprising number of people will say that it isn't because of the energy and water usage of those prompts.

I would be surprised if many people said it is unethical to use LLMs like ChatGPT for environmental reasons, as opposed to ethical principles such as encouraging unfair use of IP and copyright violation. Still, LLM queries are not made equal. The environmental justification does not take into account for models querying other services, like the famous case where a single ChatGPT query resulted in thousands of HTTP re…

> I would be surprised if many people said it is unethical to use LLMs like ChatGPT for environmental reasons, as opposed to ethical principles such as encouraging unfair use of IP and copyright violation.

Usually they complain about both.

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