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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

#321

Post by nswest23 »

s1mplicissimus wrote: post #319
XorNot wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is the real answer. It's also the only answer. The big fiction was everyone getting hopped on the idea that "karma" was going to be real, and people's virtue would be correctly identified by overt environmentalism rather then action. Fossil fuel companies won , and they won in about 1980s when BP paid an advertising firm to come up with "personal carbon footprint" as a meaningful metric. Basically destroyed…

It's a false dichotomy to say "either systemic change or individual change" - both have always and will always go hand in hand, influencing each other in the process. To say only systemic change is required leaves out the individual responsibility for those who have the means to choose. To say it's just individual change required leaves out the fact that people can only choose within the reality of their situation, w…

> for those who have the means to choose

interesting qualification.

maybe conservation should start with the masters of the universe who fly private jets all over the world etc. and emit more than the rest of us do all year in a matter of hours.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#322

Post by devmor »

andymasley wrote: post #313
devmor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am to put it mildly not an e/acc and referenced being very worried about other risks from advanced AI in the article.

Then I would certainly be interested to know why you spent so much time making the same argument e/acc AI proponents make ad nauseam.

As it stands, the majority of your article reads like a debate against a strawman that is criticizing something they don't understand, rather than a refutation of any real criticism of environmental impact from the generative AI industry.

If your aim was to shut down bad faith criticism of AI from people who don't understand it, that's admirable and I'd understand the tone of the article, but certainly not the claim of the title.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#323

Post by maeil »

johnthewise wrote: post #209
maeil wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why everything will keep going up in flames - you're not interested in doing what it has been shown to take to get people to support your cause. Unfortunately it doesn't matter what we think people should be angry about. FWIW I obviously completely agree with you! People should be angry about those things! Turns out they aren't. What matters is the reality we live in.

I'd say accusing people of random stuff(racism,sexism and other isms) have been so overplayed in recent years, not only it doesn't work anymore, it works against you.

In the US, what Trump is doing is working. In the EU, what the authoritarian far-right parties are doing is working. Their tactics have been working incredibly well for them, use them, the inane pacifist take of "being above that" by environmentalists and progressives in general is what has caused them to be completely irrelevant and the rise of authoritarianism across the West.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#324

Post by ben_w »

palata wrote: post #202
ben_w wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take your general point, but: > Except that it doesn't work if you don't drive your car alone (if you assume the plane is full of passengers, why not assuming that the car is, as well?) These can be measured for averages. Lots of cars with one person in them, seldom cars fully packed; lots of planes fully packed, seldom (but it does happen) that the plane is almost empty. > we have largely missed the goal of keepin…

> These can be measured for averages. Lots of cars with one person in them Sure, but the point should be that we should strive to share cars, not that it's okay to take the plane! Especially given the second argument which is that you don't drive 1000km every time you take your car. The footprint per km is not enough: when you take the plane you typically go much further! > Probably, yes; last year passed the thresho…

> but we will be pumping carbon underground faster than we are extracting it now!

While I know about "we need to sequester carbon", I thought the assumption was more for the last 10% (which makes sense, last 10% of anything is often expensive), not >100% of current?

> And that's with the IPCC models which tend to be optimistic (we measure that every year)!

Indeed, unfortunately.

> entirely relies on oil

I don't believe "relies on" is correct: while I would agree that e.g. plastics are made from oil, that oil currently powers some of the energy generation capacity used for the manufacturing plants that make the panels, that shipping and air transport are at present almost entirely oil-based, these are not "entirely relies on oil", they are "the economy in which they emerged happens to have been built on oil".

This is importantly different, because as renewable energy ramps up, the CO2 emissions resulting from each of these steps also goes down — even for the plastic, as the carbon in the oil itself is much more valuable as plastic than as a fuel waste product.

> By any account, this means that billions of people will have to relocate, which means global wars (with entire countries moving with their entire armies).

Aye.

Lots of room for massive disasters there, even if it were not for the fact that at least one affected area already has nukes.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#325

Post by shafyy »

mritterhoff wrote: post #265
shafyy wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if grid the was 100% renewable, this does not mean that there's no environmental cost to producing electricity. As a society, we need to decide what is important and try to minize energy consumption for things that are not important. And shoving LLMs into every nook and cranny of every application, so just tech giants who run the data centers can make more money and some middle managers get automatic summaries o…

What's the upside of moralizing energy consumption, especially once it's 100% renewable. Why not just let the market decide? If I'm paying for it, why does anyone else get a say in how I use it?

> What's the upside of moralizing energy consumption, especially once it's 100% renewable.

Because of the reason I just explained above. 100% renewable energy does not mean that producing that energy does not have an environmental cost.

> Why not just let the market decide? If I'm paying for it, why does anyone else get a say in how I use it?

Because the "free market" does not internalize externalities (costs to shared resources like the environment, air quality, public health, etc.).

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#326

Post by zelphirkalt »

alganet wrote: post #245

The part on training is misleading and full of shit. Training is not a "one-time cost". There is an implied never-ending need for training. LLMs are useless (for one of their main purposes) if the models get stale. I can use Musk's own argument on this one. Each model is a plane, fully built, that LLM researchers made into a disposable asset destined to be replaced by a newly built plane on the next training. Just in…

I am also wondering, why they don't do online learning with their LLMs. Seems silly not to. Maybe they are performing some irreversible post-training steps, that do not allow for picking up training again afterwards. In any case, being able to feed an in production model new training data would be one of the simplest ideas to come up with.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#327

Post by palata »

ben_w wrote: post #324
palata wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These can be measured for averages. Lots of cars with one person in them Sure, but the point should be that we should strive to share cars, not that it's okay to take the plane! Especially given the second argument which is that you don't drive 1000km every time you take your car. The footprint per km is not enough: when you take the plane you typically go much further! > Probably, yes; last year passed the thresho…

> but we will be pumping carbon underground faster than we are extracting it now! While I know about "we need to sequester carbon", I thought the assumption was more for the last 10% (which makes sense, last 10% of anything is often expensive), not >100% of current? > And that's with the IPCC models which tend to be optimistic (we measure that every year)! Indeed, unfortunately. > entirely relies on oil I don't belie…

> not >100% of current?

I am not completely sure about the exact numbers, but my understanding is something like this: currently we extract 7 billion tons of oil (or is it fossil fuels in general?) per year, and the IPCC scenario for 1.5C says that in a few decades we will have to not only be zero emissions, but also sequester 10 billion tons per year. So yeah, that's another way to say "impossible".

> "the economy in which they emerged happens to have been built on oil"

Sure, but... it's not clear at all if globalization the way it is now is even possible without oil. We currently use oil for transports because it is much denser. We can't move a supertanker with PV, for instance. Extrapolating the evolution of renewables from the last decade is definitely optimistic because we will have (that's just natural limits) and must use (if we don't want to reach 4C) less fossil fuel, so it will most definitely become harder and harder.

I believe that we need as much renewables and nuclear as we can, because even that will not compensate for oil. So we will live in a world with less energy and a harder climate, that's a fact. The challenge now is to deal with it, and do as much as possible to keep as much energy as we can while preserving the climate as much as we can. This is the biggest challenge in the Human history, by far. And instead of focusing on that, we try to send a few people to Mars for no good reason...

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#328

Post by andymasley »

devmor wrote: post #322
andymasley wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am to put it mildly not an e/acc and referenced being very worried about other risks from advanced AI in the article.

Then I would certainly be interested to know why you spent so much time making the same argument e/acc AI proponents make ad nauseam. As it stands, the majority of your article reads like a debate against a strawman that is criticizing something they don't understand, rather than a refutation of any real criticism of environmental impact from the generative AI industry. If your aim was to shut down bad faith criticis…

The point of the article WAS to debate someone criticizing something they don't understand. AI as a whole is using a lot of energy and we should think about the environmental impacts, but I pretty regularly meet people who think that every individual ChatGPT search is uniquely bad for the environment. I tried to make it as clear as possible that that's the issue I'm responding to, not all AI energy use.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#329

Post by andymasley »

alganet wrote: post #318
andymasley wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're trying to figure out a reasonable number for how much energy a single ChatGPT search uses, it seems weird to factor in all future training of all future models. It would be like trying to figure out the carbon cost of a single plane ride and trying to figure out what fraction of additional plane flights that one ticket incentivizes. It's too murky to put a clear number on and probably doesn't add much to the…

I agree, it's an impossible task to measure it. Almost like a labyrinth you can get lost if you worry too much about it. The environment is not a personal issue. You can't solve it just for you. The whole idea of making it personal is so that a collective aspect of it would flourish. What are you trying to flourish in people's minds?

I added in the article that I think this is all the wrong way to think about environmentalism anyway and that people should spend most of their time working on systematically changing the energy grid to renewables. But I keep meeting people who are worried about their personal emissions from ChatGPT, so I wanted to make it clear that if you are worried about that ChatGPT isn't really a drop in the bucket compared to other things you could change.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#330

Post by stonogo »

Forbo wrote: post #233
blkhawk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a bit of research and even water just "involved" in the process is counted as used in this context. For instance river water that is used for cooling and returned is counted. I think these sort of graphs are simply misleading and should not be used.

Is that actually a common configuration? I could find very little on data centers being cooler by river water, and the few I found sounded like they were doing something novel.

Using natural water is more common in power plants, where the volume of water is sufficiently large to use concrete aquaducts and the precision of the temperature isn't as important. Most datacenter liquid cooling is treated municipal water with glycol additives to prevent corrosion and pump jamming.
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