why even do AI at all
Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
61–70 of 85 posts
Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true It’s not true. AI isn’t especially environmentally unfriendly, which means that if you’re using AI then whatever activity you would otherwise be doing stands a good chance of being more environmentally unfriendly. For instance, a ChatGPT prompt uses about as much energy as watc…
> AI isn’t especially environmentally unfriendly I think the actual answer is more nuanced and less positive. Although I appreciste how many citations your comment has! I'd point to just oe, which is a really good article MIT's technology review published about exactly this issue[0]. I'd make two overall points firstly to: > when you have the opportunity to use human labour or AI, AI is almost certainly the greener o…
I think this article is a good response to the MIT article: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/reactions-to-mit-technolog...
> AI normally generates marketing copy for someone in marketing, not by itself, and even when if it does everything itself, the marketing person might stop being employed but certainly doesn't stop existing and producing co2.
Sure, but it does it a lot quicker than they can, which means they spend more of their time on other things. You’re getting more work done on average for the carbon you are “spending”.
Also, even when ignoring the carbon cost of the human, just the difference in energy use from their computer equipment in terms of time spent on the task outstrips AI energy use.
> This may well be true for prompts, but misses out the energy intensive training process.
If you are trying to account for the fully embodied cost including production, then I think things tilt even more in favour of AI being environmentally-friendly. Do you think producing a Netflix show is carbon-neutral? I have no idea what the carbon cost of producing, e.g. Stranger Things is, but I’m guessing it vastly outweighs the training costs of an LLM.
Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are fundamental reasons public transit is always more efficient than private cars. There's no fundamental reason a really good search engine is more efficient than an LLM or any other kind of AI.
Maybe because we all know that working search is better than an LLM hands down? What are you talking about? The only reason people go to LLMs instead of Google is because Google Search has been destroyed by Sundar Pichai.
This has to be satire. LLMs are a monumental jump on search engines.
Imagine a hypothetical search competition and you are given Google and I am given ChatGPT. I’ll win every single time.
Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absurd. Training an AI is energy intensive but highly efficient. Running inference for a few hundred tokens, doing a search, stuff like that is a triviality. Each generated token takes the equivalent energy of the heat from burning ~.06 µL of gasoline per token. ~2 joules per token, including datacenter and hosting overhead. If you get up to massive million token prompts, it can get up to the 8-10 joules per…
I’m curious where you got any of those numbers. Many laptops use Compared to traditional computing it seems to me like there’s no way AI is power efficient. Especially when so many of the generated tokens are just platitudes and hallucinations.
> The agreed-on best guess right now for the average chatbot prompt’s energy cost is actually the same as a Google search in 2009: 0.3 Wh. This includes the cost of the answering your prompt, idling AI chips between propmts, cooling in the data center, and other energy costs in the data center. This does not include the cost of training the model, the embodied carbon costs of the AI chips, or the fact that data centers typically draw from slightly more carbon intense sources. If you include all of those, the full carbon emissions of an AI prompt rise to 0.28 g of CO2. This is the same emissions as we cause when we use ~0.8 Wh of energy.
How concerned should you be about spending 0.8 Wh? 0.8 Wh is enough to:
Stream a video for 35 seconds Watch an LED TV (no sound) for 50 seconds Upload 9 photos to social media Drive a sedan at a consistent speed for 4 feet Leave your digital clock on for 50 minutes Run a space heater for 0.7 seconds Print a fifth of a page of a physical book Spend 1 minute reading this blog post. If you’re reading this on a laptop and spend 20 minutes reading the full post, you will have used as much energy as 20 ChatGPT prompts. ChatGPT could write this blog post using less energy than you use to read it!
I found this helpful.
Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this why transit advocates try to reduce the need for owning a car though? I'm thinking a really good search engine would not make you reach for ai as often and so could be eco friendly that way
Yes, the greenest browser is one that doesn’t use AI. They aren’t claiming they’ve built that though, just the greenest AI.
I disagree. Without AI I might take 15 min to search for something in google that would have taken me a single prompt in ChatGPT. The energy used by my screen in those 15 minutes would be higher than the energy taken by that prompt.
Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
#66People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true but it’s an apples to pears comparison. Clearly Ecosia is pushing for “people want AI” _and_ we want to make it more ecofriendly. Taking away features from users altogether is not the right answer. It’s like saying “cheapest car is no car”. It doesn’t solve the fundamental proble…
> People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true It’s not true. AI isn’t especially environmentally unfriendly, which means that if you’re using AI then whatever activity you would otherwise be doing stands a good chance of being more environmentally unfriendly. For instance, a ChatGPT prompt uses about as much energy as watc…
Glad to see someone refute the AI water argument, I'm sick of that one. But I do not see how the displacement argument fits. Maybe you can elaborate but I don't see how we can compare AI usage to watching Netflix for any length of time. I can't see a situation where someone would substitute watching stranger things for asking chatGPT questions?
The writing and illustrating activities use less energy, but the people out there using AI to generate ten novels and covers and fire them into the kindle store would not have written ten novels, so this is not displacement either
Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
#67Is there no browser I can use without this AI trash jammed into it?
Waterfox, I’ve spent a good amount of time on scouring through the code looking at what to remove and the next release I’ve found some last remaining remnants to disable
Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
#68[flagged]
Will you be doing your part to help the environment by abstaining from all modern technology and living in a shed in the woods?
Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
#69The greenest AI is no AI though.
you're better than that
Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here
#70I think it is more the greenwashiest AI
It goes well with their greenwashing "search engine" (API to bing and google).