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Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

blog.ecosia.org

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Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#81

Post by pxoe »

Shikadi wrote: post #73
JimDabell wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spe…

There's probably a decent chance that training an LLM produces more carbon than producing stranger things

> there's probably a chance

It's this completely unfounded barrage of making shit up about energy consumption without any tether to reality that makes the whole thing with complaining about energy use seem just like a competition on who makes up the most ridiculous most hand-wringing analogy.

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#82

Post by zenware »

JimDabell wrote: post #77
Shikadi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably a decent chance that training an LLM produces more carbon than producing stranger things

I’ll readily admit that I don’t know the first thing about television production, but that doesn’t seem plausible to me. Moving lots of physical objects around takes far, far, far more work than shuffling bits, and a large proportion of that can’t come from sustainable energy sources. Think about things like flying the cast to shoot on location in Lithuania, for instance. Powering and cooling servers isn’t in the sam…

Not for nothing but the vast majority of people doing the kind of work that’s done on TV & Film just-so-happen to be geographically co-located for some reason.

It’s possibly worth noting that both activities require humans and even fully operational end-to-end supply chains of rare-earth minerals and semiconductor fabrication. Among many, many other things involved.

I just don’t think we can freely discount that it takes heavy industrial equipment and people and transport vehicles to move and process the raw materials to make LLM/AI tech possible, and that the … excitement has driven those activities to precipitous heights. And then of course transporting refined materials, fabricating end products, transporting those, building and deploying new machines in new data centers around the world, massively increasing global energy demand and spiking it way beyond household use in locales where these new data centers are deployed. And so on and so forth.

I suspect that we will find out someday that maybe LLMs really are more efficient, possibly even somehow “carbon negative” if you amortize it across a long enough timespan—but also that the data will show, for this window of time, that it was egregiously bad across a full spectrum of metrics.

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#84

Post by monegator »

Insanity wrote: post #17

People 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…

I want a car because i need a car, even tough i may agree that is environmentally unfrinedly. Unless we have a different mean of transport that gives me the same amount of freedom, i want a car.

I don't want LLMs because i don't need them, yet they are being shoved down my throat.

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#85

Post by bdbdbdb »

JimDabell wrote: post #79
bdbdbdb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> I can't see a situation where someone would substitute watching stranger things for asking chatGPT questions? Really? A bored kid can’t play around with ChatGPT instead of watching Netflix? You can substitute any other activity if you like. Netflix was just an example.

Well the point was that chatgpt doesn't use so much energy. I thought we were comparing similar activities. If we're just going to list things a bored kid can do instead of watch Netflix we'll be here all day, and most of them use less electricity than chatGPT.
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