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

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#91

Post by blharr » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:22 AM UTC

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…

It briefly touches on training, but uses a seemingly misleading statistic that comes from (in reference to GPT-4) extremely smaller models.

This article [1] says that 300 [round-trip] flights are similar to training one AI model. Its reference of an AI model is a study done on 5-year-old models like BERT (110M parameters), Transformer (213M parameters), and GPT-2. Considering that models today may be more than a thousand times larger, this is an incredulous comparison.

Similar to the logic of "1 mile versus 60 miles in a massive cruise ship"... the article seems to be ironically making a very similar mistake.

[1] https://icecat.com/blog/is-ai-truly-a-sustainable-choice/#:~....

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#92

Post by ekianjo » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:24 AM UTC

BobaFloutist wrote: post #30

ekianjo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most doctor visits are for benign matters...

The point of the doctorate is for them to make that determination.

There is no need to nitpick obvious comments. If you have a running nose and fever in winter, it's 99.99% a cold and a doctor visit will do nothing to help you, yet millions of people waste doctors time for that

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#93

Post by RHSeeger » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:24 AM UTC

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.

- Ozone

- Efficient Lighting (LEDs now, but others before)

- Santa Claus

There are certainly examples of a large portion of the population of the planet working together towards common goals. A lot of people putting in a little bit of effort _does_ happen, and it _does_ produce results.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#94

Post by ternnoburn » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:24 AM UTC

"Other bad things exist" does not mean this thing isn't bad. Or absolutely could be that all these other things are huge energy wasters AND chat gpt is an energy waster.

We have to stop thinking about problems so linearly -- it's not "solve only the worst one first", because we'll forever find reasons to not try and solve that one, and we'll throw up our hands.

Like, we're well aware animal agriculture is a huge environmental impact. But getting everyone to go vegetarian before we start thinking about any other emissions source is a recipe for inaction. We're going to have to make progress, little by little, on all of these things.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#95

Post by obeattie » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:24 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…

It’s helpful to put this issue into perspective. But dismissing issues as not worth caring about on the grounds that there exist larger problems is fallacious and, to me, quite a dangerous way to live life.

“Why worry about your town’s water quality when some countries don’t have access to clean water?”

“Why go to the dentist for a cavity when some people have no teeth?“

“Why campaign for animal rights when there are some many human rights abuses going on?”

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#96

Post by eviks » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:24 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…

> "vote with your wallet", etc, but sales will move to a less developed area and the pollution will continue.

But voting with your wallet is literally moving sales to a more developed area with less pollution?

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#97

Post by Karrot_Kream » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

scottcha wrote: post #85

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.

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.

Why does latency matter for a model that responds in 10s of seconds? Latency to a datacenter is measured in 10s or 100s of milliseconds, which is 3-4 orders of magnitude less.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#98

Post by WD-42 » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

lioeters wrote: post #33

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.

Lossy data inflation.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#99

Post by blharr » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

KTibow wrote: post #90

blharr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By TFA do you mean the author of the article? It seems to be using an outdated [and incorrect] claim (as far as I know, GPT-4 has no note of taking 200 flights of energy to train), arguing against it saying that those numbers are especially small, when they are potentially significantly larger.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#100

Post by mossTechnician » Sat, Jan 18, 2025, 6:29 AM UTC

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.

The US government could help by ending subsidies towards meat and dairy production, which will prevent those products from being artificially underpriced.

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2024/10/usda-livestoc...