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Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
81–90 of 337 posts
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Always driven by money. McD's is cheaper and easier to mass produce. Wild catch changes when it is no longer economical to fish one kind of fish. There's never an "enlightenment" of people.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#83~90% 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…
The emissions from vehicles are different from plastics produced by factories.
Also, while important, 2-3% of world emissions is a drop in the bucket compared to the other 97%. Let's consider the other causes and how we can fix them.
Think about this: for many people, not driving to work is a big deal. If people collectively decide to do that, that's a lot of effort and inconvenience just for 2-3%.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
They'll have to build new power generation and build the data centers next to it.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#85Yet 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.
There are a large number of reasons the AI datacenters are geographically distributed--just to list a few off the top of my head which come up as top drivers: latency, data sovereignty, resilience, grid capacity, renewable energy availability.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#86~90% 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…
> it's just to say that until corporations are forced to do things the right way
But this isn't going to happen by itself. We need to vote for people who believes in regulating these corporations (rather than deregulating them).
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#87This 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…
> However articles like this must link to references. There are links to sources for every piece of data in the article.
Where?
One of the most crucial points "Training an AI model emits as much as 200 plane flights from New York to San Francisco"
This seems to come from this blog https://icecat.com/blog/is-ai-truly-a-sustainable-choice/#:~....
which refers to this article https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/06/239031/training-...
which is talking about models like *GPT-2, BERT, and ELMo* -- _5+ year old models_ at this point.
The keystone statement is incredibly vague, and likely misleading. What is "an AI model"? From what I found, this is referring to GPT-2,
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#88~90% 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…
This massively lets the Philippines off the hook. China has a gazillion people, and so does India, and the rest of SE Asia is bad for pollution, but the Philippines — with 1.5% of the world’s population — is an incredible 36% of ocean plastic pollution. Also a call-out to Malaysia who are an upper-middle income country and contribute far too much per capita given their income situation, but again, they are a drop in…
What are they doing in the Philippines? Dumping household waste straight into the rivers?
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#89Such 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?
Fresh water is finite. Infinite in reuse, but we can only take so much from a river before that river ceases to be. If you have a megabit connection, it doesn't matter that your cloud backups have infinite storage, you are limited by bandwidth.
Water vapor stays aloft for wild, so there's no guarantee it enters the same watershed it was drawn from.
It's also a powerful greenhouse gas, so even though it's removed quickly, raising the rate we produce it results in more insulation.
It's not a finite resource, we need to be judicious and wise in how we allocate it.
Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However articles like this must link to references. There are links to sources for every piece of data in the article.
Where? One of the most crucial points "Training an AI model emits as much as 200 plane flights from New York to San Francisco" This seems to come from this blog https://icecat.com/blog/is-ai-truly-a-sustainable-choice/#:~... . which refers to this article https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/06/239031/training-... which is talking about models like *GPT-2, BERT, and ELMo* -- _5+ year old models_ at this point. Th…
If I understand TFA correctly that's a claim it's covering and arguing against, not arguing for.