[HN Gopher] Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
___________________________________________________________________
Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
Author : returningfory2
Score : 212 points
Date : 2025-01-18 04:31 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andymasley.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (andymasley.substack.com)
| changoplatanero wrote:
| If you use chatgpt somehow saves you from making one trip to the
| doctor in your car it can offset the entire year worth of chatgpt
| usage in terms of co2 impact.
| yapyap wrote:
| if your use of chatgpt saves you from a trip to the doctor I
| would be very concerned
| ekianjo wrote:
| Most doctor visits are for benign matters...
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| The point of the doctorate is for them to make that
| determination.
| gertlex wrote:
| More constructively, the middle ground of asking a doctor
| about some minor symptoms over async messaging or tele-
| appointments (whatever the term for those is), is
| probably always something to consider for the trivial
| stuff.
| elevaet wrote:
| My partner works in emergency. Someone came in with a
| blister on their finger yesterday. They had to see the
| patient and send them home with a bandaid. Not a good use
| of resources.
| ekianjo wrote:
| 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
| realusername wrote:
| Yes and no, you really don't need a deep expertise to
| diagnose the very common illness.
|
| And that's where chatgpt is doing great.
| kaonwarb wrote:
| Early days, but not as crazy as it sounds: https://jamanetwor
| k.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
|
| "The LLM alone scored 16 percentage points (95% CI, 2-30
| percentage points; P = .03) higher than the conventional
| resources group."
| asmor wrote:
| Would be much more interesting if this ranked based on
| severity of misdiagnosis. An LLM that is 50% better at
| diagnosing a common cold but missed sepsis 10% more often
| would not be an overall improvement.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| ChatGPT is probably adequate to provide a slightly more user-
| friendly but also slight-less-reliable replacement for a
| reliable consumer-oriented medical reference book or website
| for the task of determining whether self-care without seeing
| a doctor or seeing a doctor is appropriate for symptoms not
| obviously posing an immediate emergency.
| croes wrote:
| If ChatGPT somehow makes you eat more burgers it could make it
| makes water consumption worse.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The title does not match the content.
|
| A more appropriate title is "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are
| not significant in comparison to everything else."
|
| But, given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the
| article itself doesn't need to exist.
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the
| article itself doesn 't need to exist._
|
| Why? I regularly hear people trying to argue that LLMs are an
| environmental distaster.
| _ache_ wrote:
| Because LLMs are an environmental disaster.
|
| It's not about any individual usage. It's the global
| technology that is yet to prove to be useful and that already
| have bad for the environment.
|
| Any new usage should be free of impact on the environment.
|
| (Note: The technology of LLM itself is not an environmental
| disaster, but how it is put in use currently isn't the way).
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _It 's the global technology that is yet to prove to be
| useful_
|
| Useful for whom, by what definition? I personally find it
| very useful for my day to day work, whether it be helping
| me write code, think through ideas, or otherwise.
| _ache_ wrote:
| I don't want to be rude but I don't think that your
| personal experience is of any interest. The only question
| is "are LLM relevant ?"
|
| And the only way to assert that they are is to get
| numbers (big or small) and to compare them to
| alternatives.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > I don't think that your personal experience is of any
| interest
|
| But you didn't specify what you meant by "useful," hence
| why I asked the question I did. So under such ambiguity,
| my assertion is absolutely a counterpoint to what you
| just said. I will ask again, useful for whom, by what
| definition?
| _ache_ wrote:
| Oh! Good point, we may not have the same definition of
| usefulness.
|
| By useful I mean, to the world. That it affect the world
| in a good way. Maybe it's not the best technology to do
| something but replace the best way in an CO2 effective
| way. Maybe it is not a clean technology but increase
| overall fairness.
|
| I don't know, but it had to have a good income to the
| world in a way.
| c0redump wrote:
| > yet to prove to be useful
|
| I don't understand this perspective. It should be
| abundantly clear at this point that these systems are quite
| useful for a variety of applications.
|
| Do they have problems? Sure. Do the AI boosters who
| breathlessly claim that the models are super intelligent
| make me cringe? Sure.
|
| But saying that they're not useful is just downright crazy.
| _ache_ wrote:
| > I don't understand this perspective. It should be
| abundantly clear at this point that these systems are
| quite useful for a variety of applications.
|
| LLM are polyvalent. But in most of the tasks they are not
| the most efficient way to do the task.
|
| Want to play chess ? Use Stockfish or Leela. Want to do
| image recognition ? SAM or TinyViT like models. Want to
| know if your are sick ? Go to the doctor or at least do a
| search on the web.
|
| Yes, there is tasks where LLM are perfect for (speech
| analysis/classification for example). But omnipotent
| chatbot isn't one for example.
|
| If there were a revolutionary use, we would have a
| productivity boom. We don't. This article is from 2021:
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/1026008/the-
| comi...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _If there were a revolutionary use, we would have a
| productivity boom. We don 't._
|
| What evidence do you have for this assertion? It seems
| like you are asserting something as fact when in reality
| it's your own personal opinion, yet ironically you are
| dismissing everyone else's personal experiences as mere
| opinion too.
| _ache_ wrote:
| > What evidence do you have for this assertion?
|
| No predicted productivity boom (check last US data), no
| GDP boost yet (again last data). Even LLM enthusiast like
| McKinsey or Goldmansachs expect nothing before 2027.
|
| And it's not about LLM, it's about the whole AI progress.
| That is, obviously, a revolution.
|
| https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/ai-may-
| start-...
|
| But just to be clear. I'm denying something said to be
| obvious. I should not be the one who give sources about
| something that doesn't exist. If there is a productivity
| boom, I may not have seen it. Show it to me.
| simonw wrote:
| The article needs to exist because the idea that ChatGPT usage
| is environmentally disastrous really has started to make its
| way into the human hive mind.
|
| I'm glad someone is trying to push back against that - I see it
| every day.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in
| comparison to everything else."_
|
| Emissions _directly_ caused by Average Joe using ChatGPT is not
| significant compared to everything else. 50,000 questions is a
| lot for an individual using ChatGPT casually, but nothing for
| the businesses using ChatGPT to crunch data. 50,000
| "questions" will be lucky to get you through the hour.
|
| Those businesses aren't crunching data just for the sake of it.
| They are doing so ultimately because that very same
| aforementioned Average Joe is going to buy something that was
| produced out of that data crunching. It is the indirect use
| that raises the "ChatGPT is bad for the environment" alarm. At
| very least, we at least don't have a good handle on what the
| actual scale is. How many indirect "questions" am I asking
| ChatGPT daily?
| deepsun wrote:
| Learning a new model (like GPT-4) is way more costly than
| running it.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| To me the "ChatGPT is destroying the environment "card always
| felt somewhat like bad faith arguing from the anti-AI crowd
| trying to find any excuse for being against AI. Like, the same
| people who complained about "using AI is destroying environment"
| seemed to have no issue with boarding a plane which would emit a
| bunch of CO2 so that they can have a vacation in Europe or the
| like. Selective environmentalism.
| minimaxir wrote:
| It's less bad faith, more a meme that has become so prevalent
| that it's impossible to dispell as it's something too nuanced
| for social media. I've seen more than a few social media posts
| asking "do they really cut down a rainforest every time someone
| generates an AI image?"
| rainonmoon wrote:
| I mean we can go back and forth all day with credulous clowns
| on both sides. There are certainly plenty of misguided AI
| advocates who think what they're using is magic.
| noirbot wrote:
| I mean, it's a literal net new expenditure of power and water.
| I also deeply doubt they have "no issue" with plane travel.
| You're just assuming the worst and most hypocritical position
| to someone, which seems deeply bad faith as well.
|
| It's literally true that most of the AI vendors and their data
| center partners are writing off energy and water conservation
| targets they'd had for the near future because of LLM money.
| That is _actually bad_ in the short and likely long term,
| especially as people use LLMs for increasingly frivolous
| things. Is it really necessary to have an LLM essentially do a
| "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google Search for you at some multiple of
| that environmental cost? Because that's what most of my friends
| and coworkers use ChatGPT for. Very rarely are they using it to
| get anything more complex than just searching wikipedia or
| documentation you could have had bookmarked.
|
| A person has a choice of if they take a flight and if it's
| worth it for them. They have no power except for raising a
| complaint in public on if OpenAI or Google or whoever spends
| vast amounts of money and power to train some new model. If
| your bar is that no one is allowed to complain about a company
| burning energy unless they live a totally blameless life
| farming their own food without electricity then random
| companies will get to do any destructive act they want.
| drawfloat wrote:
| Who is this person you're constructing? Being concerned about
| plane emissions and travel is an incredibly common thing and
| people are adjusting their lifestyles accordingly - lots of
| overnight sleeper train lines are reopening due to demand.
| croes wrote:
| You are talking about hypocrites.
|
| What about the people who take the protection of the
| environment seriously?
|
| They got now a setback because not only didn't we reach our
| previous goals on lowering energy consumption but know we put
| new consumption on top of that. Just because the existing one
| ate worse doesn't make it good.
|
| There is a reason why MS missed its CO2 targets and why
| everyone is kn search for more energy sources.
|
| They all create more CO2.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| I mean.... doing most things are bad for the environment. Do less
| of everything that you don't need to.
| maeil wrote:
| 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 used half a year. And many models may not end
| up used at all. This might stop at some point, but that's
| hypothetical.
| devmor wrote:
| 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.
| blharr wrote:
| 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/#:~....
| mmoskal wrote:
| 737-800 burns about 3t of fuel per hour. NYC-SFO is about 6h,
| so 18t of fuel. Jet fuel energy density is 43MJ/kg, so 774000
| MJ per flight, which is 215 MWh. Assuming the 60 GWh figure
| is true (seems widely cited on the internets), it comes down
| to 279 one-way flights.
| blharr wrote:
| Thanks, I missed that 60 GWh figure. I got confused because
| the quotes around the statement, so I looked it up and
| couldn't find a quote. I realize now that he's quoting
| himself making that statement (and it's quite accurate)
|
| I am surprised that, somehow, the statistic didn't change
| from GPT-2-era to GPT-4. Did GPUs really get that much more
| efficient? Or that study must have some problems
| getwiththeprog wrote:
| This 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-
| Corporations are chewing through GPU hours on god-knows-what. New
| nuclear and other power facilities are being proposed to power
| their use, this is not insignificant. Schneider Electric predicts
| 93 GW of energy spent on AI by 2028.
| https://www.powerelectronicsnews.com/schneider-electric-pred...
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Governments and Mega-Corporations are chewing through GPU
| hours on god-knows-what.
|
| The "I don't know so it must be huge" argument?
| dwattttt wrote:
| Not knowing what it's being spent on is separate to knowing
| whether it's being spent
| chefandy wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I've seen multiple reports that
| predict very large increases in electricity demand.
|
| https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-
| to-...
| simonw wrote:
| The question this is addressing concerns personal use. Is it
| ethical to use ChatGPT on a personal basis? A surprising number
| of people will say that it isn't because of the energy and
| water usage of those prompts.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I would be surprised if many people said it is unethical to
| use LLMs like ChatGPT for environmental reasons, as opposed
| to ethical principles such as encouraging unfair use of IP
| and copyright violation.
|
| Still, LLM queries are not made equal. The environmental
| justification does not take into account for models querying
| other services, like the famous case where a single ChatGPT
| query resulted in thousands of HTTP requests.
| simonw wrote:
| I see people complaining that ChatGPT usage is unethical
| for environmental reasons all the time. Here's just the
| first example I found from a Bluesky search (this one
| focuses on water usage): https://bsky.app/profile/theferoci
| ty.bsky.social/post/3lfckq...
|
| "the famous case where a single ChatGPT query resulted in
| thousands of HTTP requests"
|
| Can you provide more information about that? I don't
| remember gearing about that one - was it a case of someone
| using ChatGPT to write code and not reviewing the result?
| strogonoff wrote:
| > Can you provide more information about that?
|
| Sure, I looked it up and it was a security advisory:
| https://github.com/bf/security-
| advisories/blob/main/2025-01-...
|
| I don't have the time to re-read it now so if I am
| misremembering and it is a training-time effect rather
| than query-time effect then my bad, though the point
| largely stands.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Bluesky is a special place, I am not surprised you will
| bump into the sort of activists who will critique every
| bucket of water that go into making a hamburger there.
| For those of us who avoid contact with the axe grinding
| hoards of short form media, meeting somebody who spends
| any portion of their day fretting about the water usage
| of language models is indeed a rarity.
| JimDabell wrote:
| It's not specific to Bluesky. I've seen it on Threads, X,
| Facebook, and Reddit. It's a talking point for people who
| hate AI and they tell anybody who will listen.
| minimaxir wrote:
| > I would be surprised if many people said it is unethical
| to use LLMs like ChatGPT for environmental reasons, as
| opposed to ethical principles such as encouraging unfair
| use of IP and copyright violation.
|
| Usually they complain about _both_.
| fulafel wrote:
| I feel it's great that people have gotten invested in energy
| use this way, even if it's a bit lopsisded. We should use it
| in a positive way to get public opinion and political overton
| window behind rapid decarbonization and closure of oil
| fields.
| jonas21 wrote:
| > However articles like this must link to references.
|
| There are links to sources for every piece of data in the
| article.
| blharr wrote:
| 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,
| KTibow wrote:
| If I understand TFA correctly that's a claim it's covering
| and arguing against, not arguing for.
| blharr wrote:
| 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.
| mmoskal wrote:
| I assume this comes from the 60GWh figure, which does
| translate to about 200 flights (assuming energy density of
| gasoline; in actual CO2 emissions it was probably less
| since likely cleaner energy was used than for running
| planes).
| moozilla wrote:
| The link the article uses to source the 60 GWh claim (1)
| appears to be broken, but all of the other sources I found
| give similar numbers, for example (2) which gives 50 GWh.
| This is specifically to train GPT-4, GPT-3 was estimated to
| have taken 1,287 MWh in (3), so the 50 GWh number seems
| reasonable.
|
| I couldn't find any great sources for the 200 plane flights
| number (and as you point out the article doesn't source
| this either), but I asked o1 to crunch the numbers (4) and
| it came up with a similar figure (50-300 flights depending
| on the size of the plane). I was curious if the numbers
| would be different if you considered emissions instead of
| directly converting jet fuel energy to watt hours, but the
| end result was basically the same.
|
| [1] https://www.numenta.com/blog/2023/08/10/ai-is-harming-
| our-pl...
|
| [2] https://www.ri.se/en/news/blog/generative-ai-does-not-
| run-on...
|
| [3] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-hidden-
| cost-...
|
| [4] https://chatgpt.com/share/678b6178-d0e4-800d-a12b-c319e
| 324d2...
| gloflo wrote:
| Just 200 flights? I would expected a number at least 100
| times that. 200 flights of that range are what, 0.1% of a
| single day of global air traffic?
|
| All of that is crazy in terms of environmental destruction
| but this makes AI training seem nothing to focus on to me.
| andymasley wrote:
| I'm the author, the 200 flights number is taken from posts
| made by environmentalists and seem to match public numbers
| given (about 50 GWh)
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2024/05/23/ai-is-
| pus....
|
| If you think the numbers I used are wildly off I'd really
| appreciate any source saying so and I'll update the post
| with the correct amounts.
| feverzsj wrote:
| Yeah, there are lots of things worse than LLMs. But, at least,
| they are useful and profitable.
| blkhawk wrote:
| what does "water used by data center" even mean? Does it consume
| the water somehow? What does it turn into? Steam? So uploading a
| 1GB file boils away nearly 1 liter of water? Or is it turned into
| bits somehow in some kind of mass to energy conversion? I sorta
| doubt that. Also this means data centers would have cooling
| towers like some power stations. Are we talking about the cooling
| towers of power stations?
|
| I think at least that graph is complete non-sense. I will try and
| have chatGPT explain it to me.
| stonogo wrote:
| Yes, datacenters have cooling towers. There are lots of good
| articles about this topic. A good starting point is "water
| usage effectiveness" (WUE) which is one way this is tracked.
| blkhawk wrote:
| The one near here just has heat exchanges. But even if all
| the others use evaporators then potential water usage is
| extremely misleading because its not like the water is
| consumed - its just temporarily unavailable.
|
| Also why doesn't uploading a 1GB file to my NAS boil a liter
| of water? are maybe all the switches and routers used between
| me and the datacenter water-cooled? I mean I can see such
| switches existing but I don't see them be the norm. Why
| doesn't the DSLAM on the Street outside emit steam. Is there
| maybe one bad switch somewhere that just spews steam?
|
| What I am saying is that at least that graph is without
| further explanation... bad.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The one near here just has heat exchanges. But even if
| all the others use evaporators then potential water usage
| is extremely misleading because its not like the water is
| consumed
|
| Water consumption in all contexts is mostly fresh water
| returned from immediately usable form to either evaporation
| or the ocean. It is not "extremely misleading", because
| when it returns to immediately usable form by, e.g.,
| precipitation, that's when new water is considered to be
| made available. The normal definitions are internally
| consistent and useful.
| blkhawk wrote:
| 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.
| Forbo wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > what does "water used by data center" even mean?
|
| This doesn't clarify what exactly it includes, but there are
| two main things that generally are included:
|
| (1) _Direct_ water use for cooling, (which, yes, ends up as
| steam rom cooling towers), and
|
| (2) Water used in generating electricity consumed by data
| centers, which, yeah, is again evaporated in cooling towers.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > what does "water used by data center" even mean?
|
| It's referring to water lost to evaporation in evaporative
| cooling towers, both at the data center and at the power
| generating plant.
| yapyap wrote:
| Such 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 RIGHT NOW, but
| you are telling the corresponding company that owns the LLM you
| use "there is interest in this product", en masse. With these
| interest indicators they will plan for the future and plan for
| even more environmental destruction.
| jna_sh wrote:
| Similar feelings about the repeated references to the
| apparently agreed consensus that individual action is pointless
| vs systematic change like switching to a renewable energy
| system. Jevons Paradox would like a word.
| simonw wrote:
| Plenty of companies have revealed exactly how much energy and
| CO2 they have used training a model. Just off the top of my
| head, I've seen those numbers are available for Meta's Llama
| models, Microsoft's Phi series and DeepSeek's models -
| including their impressive DeepSeek v3 which trained for less
| than $6m in cost - a huge reduction compared to other similar
| models, and a useful illustration of how much more effect this
| stuff can get on the training side of things.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I don't care about energy usage. How exhausting it must be to
| be a climate hysterical person and try to factor the climate
| cost of every single action you take in life.
|
| Charge the consumer of energy the requisite price. If you want
| to make them pay for some externality, great. But I refuse to
| worry and be burdened by anxiety over every single unit of
| electricity consumed. Such a tiring, bullshit part of life the
| progressives have foisted on elites. And it is elites only as
| poors don't give a shit
| ben_w wrote:
| > Charge the consumer of energy the requisite price. If you
| want to make them pay for some externality, great.
|
| > And it is elites only as poors don't give a shit
|
| The poor people are also consumers; raising prices of energy
| for that group is a fantastic way to get kicked out of office
| even if you're an actual literal dictator.
|
| People are complex.
|
| The screeds you're objecting to are part of the political
| process to tell governments to do something, even if that
| something ends up being a mix of what you suggest plus
| subsidies for the poor, or something completely different, in
| any case to avoid being defenestrated
| nick__m wrote:
| 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?
| ternnoburn wrote:
| 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.
| fulafel wrote:
| Anyone care to have a go at back of the envelope number for
| training energy use amortized per query for ChatGPT's models?
| Is the training or the inference going to dominate?
| pixelesque wrote:
| 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 detail on what the compute is being used
| for: i.e. no doubt there are situations currently going on where
| Person A uses a LLM to expand something like "make a long
| detailed report about our sales figures", which produces a 20
| page report and delivers it to Person B. Person B then says "I
| haven't time to read all this, LLM please summarise it for me".
|
| So you'd basically have LLM inference compute being used as a
| very inefficient method of data/request transfer, with the sender
| expanding a short amount of information to deliver to the
| recipient, and then the said recipient using an LLM on the other
| side to reduce it back again to something more manage-able.
| lioeters wrote:
| 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.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Lossy data inflation.
| iTokio wrote:
| > It is extremely bad to distract the climate movement with
| debates about inconsequential levels of emission
|
| This. So we should focus on optimizing transport, heating, energy
| and food.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| It's discomforting to me when people compare resource usage of
| ChatGPT, a computer, to the resource usage of a human being.
|
| I've seen charts like this before that compare resource usage of
| people to corporations, implying corporations are the bigger
| problem. The implication here seems to be the opposite, and that
| tone feels just a little eugenicist.
| Liquix wrote:
| ~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
| meat, not mining bitcoin, not using chatgpt, not driving cars -
| are a drop in the bucket compared to standard practice overseas
| manufacturing.
|
| us privileged folks could "just boycott", "buy renewable", "vote
| with your wallet", etc, but sales will move to a less developed
| area and the pollution will continue. this is not to say that the
| environment isn't important - it's critically important. it's
| just to say that until corporations are forced to do things the
| right way, it's ludicrous to point fingers at each other and
| worry that what we do day-to-day is destroying the planet.
|
| [0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368
| saagarjha wrote:
| 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 emissions.
| irishloop wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| You do this through the government. Implement meat
| rations. Everybody is only allowed so much meat per week.
| So you have to make it count.
| jchw wrote:
| I think this might be the first idea I've ever heard that
| I truly feel will backfire far worse than alcohol
| prohibition. I almost want to see it happen.
| VSerge wrote:
| All families can't afford meat daily, let alone any type
| of meat they want. So, some families might favor chicken
| and certain processed meats here and there, but most cuts
| of beef and lamb for example might be out of the
| question, and so will daily meat consumption. The same
| applies for dairy, they might afford big blocks of
| tasteless cheese, but won't touch often cheese with
| taste, French or otherwise. There is no enforced
| rationing, but choice is reduced if not removed for a
| good fraction of the population, purely for economic
| reasons.
| smcin wrote:
| The USDA budget totals ~$200bn, of which 70% goes to SNAP
| (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
|
| Table FNS-1, p58 https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files
| /documents/2023-usda...
| numpad0 wrote:
| What's missing from this type of discussions is
| performance quantification and scientific attitude. It
| assumes solid food is indulgence and ultraprocessed vegan
| shakes paired with appropriate willpower is all it takes
| to do anything.
|
| Things just don't work that way. Been there, done that.
| Willpower does nothing. Extra calories around your berry
| is extra calories around your berry. It's much more
| worthwhile to think about reducing GHG emission from
| farming than deceiving yourself into self-harming and
| projecting your own doing onto greater society.
| echelon wrote:
| > Implement meat rations.
|
| I don't think we can ever be friends.
| ido wrote:
| There's less extreme government action possible: tax meat
| & dairy higher.
|
| There are already precedents for that, for example here
| in Germany cigarettes are taxed to about 70% and hard-
| liquor (altho it's more complicated to calculate as it
| depends on exact alcohol content) to about 40%.
|
| Meat is only taxed at 7% via VAT (similar to sales tax in
| the US).
| saagarjha wrote:
| Vegetarian here. People who eat meat tend to reduce their
| consumption if you 1. charge them appropriately for it
| and 2. give them good alternatives. Telling them to not
| do something usually makes them angry unfortunately.
| maeil wrote:
| > Telling them to not do something usually makes them
| angry unfortunately
|
| Then it's up to you to get even angrier.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Angry people are spiteful. I generally find it a lot more
| productive to get them to understand why their choices
| have consequences, how the can (progressively!) fix the
| problems, and watch things improve from there.
| maeil wrote:
| Environmentalists and those championing similar causes
| politically have taken this approach for decades. The
| result has been a perpetual shift to the right-wing who
| has no qualms about playing dirty, using fear, anger and
| other tribal emotions to gain support. Everywhere in the
| West, authoritarians are seizing power.
|
| Good luck with continuing the virtuous approach while the
| world goes up in flames. It hasn't worked and has gotten
| us to where we are right now.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I think people should be angry about _that_ , yes. I'm
| not particularly interested in tying eating meat to
| racism or whatever it takes to make people fearful enough
| to support you.
| maeil wrote:
| 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.
| johnthewise wrote:
| 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.
| smcin wrote:
| How effective IYO was Morgan Spurlock (RIP) the activist
| filmmaker ("Supersize Me", [0]) at trying to educate the
| general (meat-eating) US public on US meat production,
| the restaurant industry, nutrition, marketing?
|
| (PS:it's not a dichotomy between strict vegetarianism vs
| meat 4+ days/wk. Can encourage people to eat healthier
| and more sustainable.)
|
| [0]: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1041597/
| saagarjha wrote:
| I mean I'm not an expert but I think the general
| sentiment among Americans about meat is "yeah I hear meat
| production is gross/polluting/inhumane but I like meat
| and don't want to think about that". Charitably I think
| we have a lot of things we can care about and most people
| want to ignore this, plus there's a lot of cultural
| baggage tied to diet people don't want to leave. I think
| actual solutions will mostly involve the idea that
| reduction is good instead of throwing up your hands
| because you're unable to commit to being vegan, and
| adding options to people's diet that they actually enjoy.
| I think we have a very hard time solving "I can't
| completely solve this and also it requires changes I
| don't like so doing nothing at all is fine".
| ibejoeb wrote:
| He didn't try to educate. He sensationalized for profit.
| Supersize Me was a grift. He drank himself fat and
| fabricated his numbers.
| smcin wrote:
| Not by rationing, if you meant the US government: US per-
| capita consumption of meat is 328 lbs/year [UN FAO].
| You'd try to reduce the subsidies and incentives for
| meat/ corn/ soybean production which are baked into the
| USDA budget ($200bn in 2024), since the 1930s (Great
| Depression), and more since the 1950s (and related stuff
| like the marketing tool of the "Food Pyramid"). These
| will be as politically hard to cancel as defense
| production or military bases or prisons.
|
| Here's even a 2023 editorial from the Kansas City Star
| pointing the blame at Big Ag "Corn drives US food policy.
| But big business, not Midwestern farmers, reaps the
| reward" [0]:
|
| > _No, corn is not an evil crop, nor are farmers in the
| Corn Belt shady criminals. However, the devastating
| effect of corn owes to the industrialization of the plant
| by a small group of global agribusiness and food
| conglomerates, which acts as a kind of de facto corn
| cabal. These massive corporations -- seed companies, crop
| and meat processors, commodity traders and household food
| and beverage brands -- all survive on cheap commodity
| corn, which currently costs about 10 cents a pound.
| Corn's versatility makes it the perfect crop to "scale"
| (commoditize, industrialize and financialize)._
|
| A libertarian take is the Cato Institute "Farm Bill Sows
| Dysfunction for American Agriculture" [1]:
|
| > _The Sprawling Farm Bill:... has its roots in the
| century-old New Deal and is revised by Congress every
| five years... "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
| (SNAP), was added to the Farm Bill in 1973 to ensure
| support from rural and urban lawmakers, accounts for
| about three-quarters of the omnibus package. Some
| lawmakers and pundits have proposed splitting SNAP from
| the Farm Bill to stop the logrolling and facilitate a
| clearer debate on farm subsidy programs, which make up
| the rest of the bill." ...aslo criticizes crop insurance
| subsidies (which mainly go on the four big crops),
| Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage
| (PLC) ("Welfare for Wealthier Farmers"), Crop insurance
| subsidies (" originally envisioned as a more stable and
| cost-efficient alternative to ad hoc disaster payments,
| but they have acted more as a supplement than a
| replacement--and may have actually increased risks along
| the way.")_
|
| [0]: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-
| opinion/guest-com...
|
| [1]: https://www.cato.org/policy-investigation/farm-bill-
| sows-dys...
| hgomersall wrote:
| That's an incredible amount of meat. That's 400g a day
| per person. I can't even eat that much meat in one go
| without feeling the meal is seriously unbalanced. Half
| that is a meat heavy meal for me. So that must mean a
| significant number people are eating huge amounts of meat
| for every meal. That or the waste is huge.
| smcin wrote:
| Yes that stat does make me wonder. Even if 21% of meat is
| wasted [0]. (Possibly they count "reaches a supermarket
| shelf" as = "not wasted", even if it isn't ultimately
| cooked or eaten?). But even then.
|
| ([1], the 2023 study by Tulane University supposedly
| finding "12% Of Americans 1/2 Of The Nation's Beef: How a
| mere 12% of Americans eat half the nation's beef,
| creating significant health and environmental impacts" is
| a red herring, all it says is that _on any given day_ ,
| some fraction of meat-eaters exceed portion sizes ("Those
| 12%--most likely to be men or people between the ages of
| 50 and 65--eat what researchers called a disproportionate
| amount of beef on a given day").
|
| [0]: https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/food-
| waste-in-the-...
|
| > " _Wasted food ranks as the number one material in US
| landfills, accounting for 24.1% of all municipal solid
| waste. Americans waste 21% of meat, 46% of fruit and veg,
| 35% of seafood, and 17% of dairy products. Altogether,
| Americans waste between 30% and 40% of the total US food
| supply. "... "Poor packaging techniques causes 10% of
| grain products, 5% of seafood, and 4% of meat to be
| lost."_
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditForGrownups/comments/
| 16cpmni/...
| anonzzzies wrote:
| People, especially men, get irrationally angry by even
| the slightest thought of their precious meat being
| touched (including here on HN; there are more than a few
| crackpots over here who promote a meat only or even red
| meat only diet). If there would be a reason to violently
| overthrow the gov, this would probably be it; not for the
| things that actually matter to better or save humanity,
| but to save their daily meat platter.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| 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.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| 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.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| Internationally in markets undistorted by meat subsidies,
| plant-based food is cheaper and easier to mass produce...
| RHSeeger wrote:
| - 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.
| ido wrote:
| Smoking, drinking - both on the decline for the last
| decades.
| somenameforme wrote:
| There was a profit motive in all of those except Santa.
| For instance until the main players in CFCs (which were
| the main cause of ozone depletion) were able to invent,
| patent, and market an alternative to CFCs they
| successfully lobbied against any change. Then they got a
| new patent, turned 180 degrees, claiming CFCs were the
| worst thing to ever exist - and made a ton of money after
| they were banned. Same thing with stuff like asthma
| inhalers.
|
| When people _want_ to do something, we 're unstoppable.
| But unfortunately that means the good and the bad, and
| right now polluting actions are _incredibly_ beneficial,
| and the alternatives are mediocre and not only
| unprofitable, but generally incur a substantial cost.
| There 's a reason places like the US/Canada/Australia
| talk a mean game about climate change, yet remain some of
| the biggest polluters per capita, by far.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Uh, Santa is the biggest advertising campaign for
| consumerism the world has ever known
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I agree with you and that's why I'm believe soy will
| conquer the humans nutrition sooner or later. It already
| is the undisputed king of world-scale animal nutrition
| because it's cheap and super nutritious. The drawbacks in
| Brasil happens because of its success, replace by another
| crop and the problems will be even worse.
|
| Replace animals proteins for humans by soy for human and
| you can divide world soy production by ~5.
| extra88 wrote:
| Improvement of the ozone hole wasn't from millions of
| consumers making different choices, it was from
| government regulation and choices of the few leading
| corporations in particular industries.
|
| Efficient lighting is a mix of regulation against worse
| lighting and individual consumer economic self-interest,
| lowering their electrical bill (and sometimes longer-
| lasting bulbs).
|
| Neither of these are examples of large numbers of people
| choosing to sacrifice something for a common goal.
| sofixa wrote:
| Yes, a big multi government marketing campaign "Just
| don't eat meat 1 or 2 days a week" can definitely work.
| E.g. friday is "Fish day" in a lot of places
| (education/public) due to Catholic church influences.
|
| Just need a catchy word and campaign for "Veggie
| Wednesday".
| Forbo wrote:
| Meatless Mondays are a thing.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Technically most hindus don't eat meat / maybe eats eggs
| rarely , So its definitely possible but it would probably
| have to be ingrained in the religion itself.
|
| Another reason is that we had plenty of land and rice and
| wheat etc. just made more sense than eating meat I
| suppose.
|
| I have never tasted meat , eggs sometimes but I am
| stopping that as well , not for hinduism but because I am
| so close to this ideal , might as well do it 100% lol
|
| I am majorly convinced that there is no god but if I wish
| there was a god , I wish for Hindu deities (though I am
| obviously biased and this explains why people have such
| biases even being half atheists)
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I was able to cut out 95% of meat without it being much
| trouble.
| llmthrow102 wrote:
| Greenhouse gas emissions are only a fraction of terrible
| things that humans are inflicting on the environment, and
| meat/dairy are both nutritious food that provides
| requirements for sustenance, and if not eaten need to be
| replaced by something else that will also cause greenhouse
| gas emissions (aka, a 10% reduction in meat consumption
| does not equal to a 1.45% reduction in greenhouse gas
| emissions)
|
| I think it's kind of crazy to place the burden of
| environmental destruction on individual buying habits,
| rather than the people in power who actually have the
| ability to make sweeping changes that might actually move
| the needle.
|
| Let's start with not incentivizing, then disincentivizing
| the mass production and importation of plastic garbage
| waste and e-waste that not only create greenhouse gas
| emissions but pollute the environment in other,
| irreversible ways.
|
| And if your government and leaders don't make this a
| priority, and regardless of who you vote in, big-name corpo
| donors get their way instead, then maybe it's time for a
| new government.
| saagarjha wrote:
| It won't be 1.45% but it will be 1.3%. Meat is
| exceptionally inefficient compared to non-meat. It sounds
| false but it really is like that :(
| themk wrote:
| Meat and dairy are bad for GHG, but they are also
| terrible for most of the other bad things we do to the
| planet. Eutrophication, species extinction, habitat loss,
| water use.
|
| And the people in power do what the people want, that's
| why they are in power. Imagine telling people they
| couldn't eat as much meat. Would be political suicide.
|
| That's why individual buying habits are important. If
| many individuals change, we might change as a society.
| And at some point there might be a tipping point where
| the people in charge can make a change.
|
| Also, blaming other people for all the problems is not a
| great way to solve a problem. Take some responsibility.
| starspangled wrote:
| Not encouraging population growth everywhere but
| particularly in the highest per-capita consuming and
| polluting countries, but rather allow them to naturally
| level off and even gradually decline would go a much longer
| way. It would enable significant emissions reductions _and_
| reduction in all other environmental impacts of consumption
| without impacting quality of life.
|
| Eating bugs and living in pods sounds great and all, but if
| the end result is just allowing the ruling class to pack
| more drones and consumers in like sardines then it's not
| really solving anything.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| 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...
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Since my birth the population of earth has almost doubled.
| fastball wrote:
| This assumes all emissions / externalities are created equal,
| which they are not.
| eru wrote:
| You are right. Though for CO2 that simplification comes
| pretty close to true.
| smcin wrote:
| Could you say more?
|
| Are you talking about comparing CO2 to N2O to CH4 to
| fluorocarbons, for example?
| fastball wrote:
| Yes, that. But also that these different externalities
| will have different responses to reduction at scale,
| which also impacts how effective action on a more
| "personal" level really is.
|
| For example the OP was talking about plastic. A 2%
| reduction in plastic waste has a clear benefit, because
| _any_ amount of plastic reduction is a bonus. However it
| is not clear that a 5% reduction in CO2 emissions due to
| Americans driving their cars less will have any
| meaningful difference when it comes to climate change.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| "Driving to work" is hardly a "vote with your wallet" style
| consumer choice. Our housing, building, and transportation
| policies have been geared towards encouraging car-dependence
| for nearly a century. In places with better public transit
| and bike lanes, people spontaneously choose to use those
| modes of transport. Just like with companies dumping as much
| plastic waste/CO2 as they can get away with, this is a policy
| problem, plain and simple. No amount of pro-environment metal
| straw campaigns will solve it. At best environmentally-
| conscious messaging could encourage changes in voting
| behavior which influence policy. At worst people could be
| convinced that they're "doing their part" and fail to
| consider systemic changes.
| hmottestad wrote:
| Regular voting is usually what affects things such as the
| transportation infrastructure in your country or city. It's
| a slow proceed though.
|
| Here in Oslo there has been a lot of investment in bike
| lanes, but just because one part of the local government
| builds more bike lanes doesn't mean that other parts of the
| government will follow suit. Police still doesn't care
| about cars illegally blocking the bike lanes. The people
| ploughing snow see bike lanes as the last thing that should
| need ploughing, preferably no earlier than 2 weeks after it
| snowed. A dedicated bike path I use to work is supposed to
| be ploughed within 2 hours of snow, but it took a week
| before anything was done and now three weeks later it's
| still not to the standard that the government has set.
| sshine wrote:
| Speaking of Oslo and bicycles, I just want to add an
| amazing statistic that surfaced a couple of years ago
| here on Hacker News:
|
| Oslo has a zero pedestrian and bicycle mortality rate!
|
| https://thecityfix.com/blog/how-oslo-achieved-zero-
| pedestria...
|
| > _In 2015, the political climate and public will in the
| City of Oslo changed the tone on accepting continued
| surface transportation fatalities. The mayor, city
| council and transport division staff all supported a
| shift in roadway decision-making from car-centric to
| people-centric. [...]_
|
| Neighboring capitals with similar progressive bicycle
| cultures (Denmark, Sweden) have somewhat low but non-zero
| mortality rate as Oslo had 6 years ago. So the policies
| definitely make a change, but it's the consequence of a
| culture. You won't see American politicians suggesting a
| ban on cars in big cities.
| hmottestad wrote:
| We've had at least one cyclist killed since that article
| came out.
| dijit wrote:
| I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally
| reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.
|
| It's bad enough that even non-US people regurgitate those
| talking points despite them being significantly less true
| for them; because they see it so much online.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally
| reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.
|
| They do, because their experience is that transit and
| biking really _do_ suck and are useless. Which is
| accurate, for where they 've lived.
|
| The problem is that you have to convince people that
| things could be better, when their lived experience is
| that it's always terrible.
| lugu wrote:
| I live in place known for its rainy weather, 15 km from
| work (because of the housing crisis). Being overweight,
| biking to work never crossed my mind for two years. Once
| I tried to commute during weekend, as a challenge. I
| realized a few things: - same duration as the train - it
| give me the exercise I needed - it relaxes me - it is
| free since I already have a bike
|
| Yes, it still take me 50 min to commute, but now I enjoy
| it and even volunteerly go to the office more often. It
| have been 6 months.
|
| My point is: those who complain about biking being
| terrible or impractical should give it a real try. It may
| fit you.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| And if you need help and can afford it, ebikes exist.
| Some of them really cheap. Hopefully not skimping on
| safeties though.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Ebikes are really great and I often ride one to work.
| They do help with speed, range, motivation, and of
| course, hills.
|
| They don't do anything about unsafe infrastructure
| though, which is by far the US' biggest problem for
| biking. To say that American bike infrastructure is
| garbage tier is an insult to garbage, that's how bad it
| typically is. It's extremely unsafe, and people can feel
| it, they can tell, hence why hardly anyone actually bikes
| to work.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I've biked around in a bunch places in the US, and the
| reality is that it really is terrible. Bike
| infrastructure is F-tier almost everywhere, rising to
| D-Tier in supposedly bike friendly cities like Portland.
|
| Bike infrastructure generally
|
| * Is designed to be unsafe. Door zones are common, actual
| physical protection or segregation is rare, ESPECIALLY
| for intersections.
|
| * Stops and starts randomly. Just look at Google maps for
| a city, you'll be able to see that the bike network is
| completely fragmented, with many bike lane suddenly
| disappearing on a road for no apparent reason.
|
| * Randomly changes style/design principles even within
| the same city, so both you and drivers are constantly
| confused unless you're already used to a route.
|
| * Is poorly enforced, with drivers routinely driving or
| parking in bike lanes with punishment being a rarity.
|
| Now, some spots have good bike trails that work for their
| commute, and that's a great option when it's available.
| But I'm a bit tired of the "biking is actually okay in
| the US!" gaslighting.
|
| Some people still manage, I do sometimes, but after
| getting hit by cars a couple times I tired of making
| excuses for it. There's a reason hardly anyone bikes for
| their commute in the states: overall, biking in the US is
| simply awful, and that's the truth.
| Fricken wrote:
| I ride a bike, and doing so has saved me about $450k in
| transportation costs over 3 decades. The effort it takes
| to earn $450k is something to include amongst the
| unpleasantries and pathologies associated with driving.
|
| Now, of course, I've had my whole life to set up my whole
| life the way I want it, and with a little foresight it
| really wasn't that difficult to set it up in a way that
| facilitates getting around on a bicycle. It involved
| making choices. Choices about where to work and live. If
| more people made such choices, there would be more
| options available to facilitate them.
| ben_w wrote:
| 450k tax-free, too, because it's a cost saving and those
| aren't taxable*.
|
| Myself I've not driven at least since late 2017, thanks
| to excellent and cheap public transport; even before the
| Germany-wide EUR58/month ticket, the more expensive
| Berlin-AB ticket that I used to get was much much less
| than your $15k/year.
|
| Do most people plan like that?
|
| * usually, though IIRC buying a house in Switzerland gets
| you a tax equal to the money you saved from not renting
| it?
| agentultra wrote:
| We also have a carbon tax where I'm from. Since I don't
| own a car I don't pay much into it. However I get a nice
| big rebate on my tax return. I basically get paid a small
| amount to not own a car.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I've ridden bikes for transportation in a handful of
| regions in the US. It is essentially always bad, it's
| just a matter of some people being able to look past or
| tolerate the awfulness.
|
| Yes, some people are okay sharing a lane with cars, or
| using a strip of paint for protection, but accepting a
| poor status quo doesn't stop the status quo from being
| poor.
|
| Occasionally there's a route that's legitimately good,
| almost always due to having an off street trail you can
| use for the bulk of the commute. Those can be great.
|
| But once you hit bike lanes in an urban area, it's
| virtually always terrible. A lot of Americans are just
| used to the terribleness and don't notice it anymore, the
| same way they don't notice how almost every neighborhood
| is designed to be unwalkable (and how most are designed
| to be economically segregated besides).
| ben_w wrote:
| > The problem is that you have to convince people that
| things could be better, when their lived experience is
| that it's always terrible.
|
| Ironically, international air travel to places where it
| works great may help with this.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| For some people yes.
|
| But a lot of people are mentally stubborn, and seem to
| have inbuilt excuses of, "it wouldn't work _here_! "
| despite not spending even ten seconds thinking about it.
| saagarjha wrote:
| See, my point is that everyone first goes "it's not me",
| then they understand it _is_ them and go "but it's not my
| policies" and then they vote in the policies which are the
| problem. It's totally fine to go "we need collective action
| to fix this". _But you have to actually join the collective
| action._ You think billionaires are getting rich by
| committing environmental arbitrage? Then don't oppose
| attempts to make the costs appropriate, even if you must
| now pay your fair share too.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Sure, recognizing that the problem is political is step
| one. Step two is... political activism, I guess? Lack of
| local political engagement and organizing is part of what
| allows problems like these to form.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Not just lack but outright apathy and villainizing of
| these attempts. If you try to tax gas some oil CEO will
| run a campaign explaining to the working class that their
| commute will now cost 10% more, which obviously makes
| people upset. Part of it is that we, unfortunately, can't
| actually subsidize car commuters anymore. But part of it
| is that CEO is going to incur a cost of 50%, as he
| should, which is why he's bothering to spend money riling
| people up.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| It is not feasible to take a bike or public
| transportation to work in many parts of the world so a
| policy change like that would just incur an additional
| cost to those who have no alternative.
|
| A better idea is to encourage other types of
| transportation in private companies rather than penalize
| existing companies with taxes. If taxing the companies
| will raise prices on consumers, you might as well
| consider it an additional tax on the people.
| Forbo wrote:
| Redistribute the tax back to the people. That way you're
| eliminating the price externality but offsetting the cost
| to individuals. The fossil fuel industry can't continue
| to plug their ears and ignore the costs associated with
| putting more and more carbon in the atmosphere. We need
| to hold them to account.
| aio2 wrote:
| 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%.
| ido wrote:
| while 3% might sound like a drop in the bucket, there isn't
| any single specific chunk of the rest of the 97% that will
| immediately cut, say, 30-40% of emissions (also remember
| that 2-3% is the super specific "Americans not driving
| cars", not "everyone in the world not driving cars").
| saagarjha wrote:
| There isn't really a magic wand we can wave and get 50%
| back for free and without inconvenience. The other 97%
| involves things like individually figuring out where our
| electricity generation goes. Or figuring out which farms to
| shut down, or what manufacturing we don't like anymore. All
| of this must happen. It will be inconvenient. I picked a
| slice that is immediately relevant to a lot of people here.
| But there are a lot of axes to look at this.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to
| work.
|
| This is easily solved by switching to EVs. A small-size EV
| (perfect for personal transportation) is only slightly less
| CO2-efficient than rail ( https://ourworldindata.org/travel-
| carbon-footprint ).
|
| I wish the world would ditch public transit entirely. It's
| nothing but a misery generator. It's far better to switch to
| remote work and distributed cities.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I unironically like public transport because someone else
| does the "driving" for me. I'm sure someone is going to
| explain how Waymo solves this but sitting on a train with
| my laptop and breakfast while I magically get teleported to
| my office is much nicer than even being in the back seat of
| a car.
| cyberax wrote:
| > I magically get teleported to my office
|
| You work on a train station platform? My condolences.
|
| And indeed, self-driving will solve this. You'll be able
| to just step into a car, and get teleported to the door
| of your office. After stopping at your favorite coffee
| shop midway.
| VMG wrote:
| Public transit is not miserable everywhere. In Central
| European countries it can be quite enjoyable.
| Brystephor wrote:
| How much of Americans driving to work is because they choose
| too though? Amazon's 5 day RTO policy is a good example. How
| many of the people now going to an office 5 days a week
| would've done so without the mandate? I see the traffic every
| day, and saw the same area before the mandate, so I can tell
| you with confidence that there's many more cars on the road
| as a result of this commute. this all funnels back to the
| corporate decision to mandate 5 days in office.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Exactly. IMO, any politician who's serious about saving the
| environment or reducing the number of cars should be
| proposing bills to heavily tax employers for every
| unnecessary commute they require of their employees (maybe
| $100-$500 per employee per unnecessary day required in the
| office).
| netcan wrote:
| _if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact_
|
| This is a good sentiment. But, in context, it is a _fallacy._
| A harmful one.
|
| Consumer action on transport and whatnot, assuming a massive
| and persistent global awareness effort... has the potential
| of adding up to a rounding error.
|
| Housing policy, transport policy, urban planning... these are
| what affects transport emissions. Not individual choices.
|
| Look at our environmental history. Consumer choice has no
| wins.
|
| It's propaganda. Role reversal. Something for certain
| organizations to do. It is not an actual effort to achieve
| environmental benefit.
|
| We should be demanding governments clean up. Governments and
| NGOs should not be demanding that we clean up.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| I think many Americans driving to work would be happy to work
| from home if not RTO mandates (encouraged by the government
| at least on a local level).
| photonthug wrote:
| > That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for
| example, driving their cars to work.
|
| Even an example like this that is carefully chosen to make
| consumers feel/act more responsible falls short. You want
| people to change their lives/careers to not drive? Ok, but
| most people already want to work from home, so even the
| personal "choice" about whether to drive a car is basically
| stuck like other issues pending government / corporate
| action, in this case to either improve transit or to divest
| from expensive commercial real estate. This is really obvious
| isn't it?
|
| Grabbing back our feeling of agency should not come at the
| expense of blaming the public under the ridiculous pretense
| of "educating" them, because after years of that it just
| obscures the issues and amounts to misinformation. Fwiw I'm
| more inclined to agree with admonishing consumers to "use
| gasoline responsibly!" than say, water usage arguments where
| cutting my shower in half is supposed to somehow fix decades
| of irresponsible farming, etc. But after a while, people
| mistrust the frame itself where consumers are blamed, and so
| we also need to think carefully about the way we conduct
| these arguments.
| jamilton wrote:
| The amount of people who choose to not drive to work is
| significantly impacted by policy.
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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 the ocean
| compared to the (much, much poorer) Philippines.
|
| Having spent half my life in South-East Asia, there's a
| cultural problem that needs fixing there.
|
| A pretty graph that make it clear just how bad the most
| egregious polluters are comparatively:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ocean-plastic-waste-per-c...
| mnsc wrote:
| What are they doing in the Philippines? Dumping household
| waste straight into the rivers?
| deepsun wrote:
| I think they are fishing commerially a lot. Most of the
| ocean trash comes from the fishing industry (e.g. abandoned
| nets).
| petesergeant wrote:
| Pretty much. Buying everything in sachets and then not
| having any real waste disposal;
| https://earth.org/philippines-plastic/
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > 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).
| obeattie wrote:
| 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?"
| eviks wrote:
| > "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?
| ternnoburn wrote:
| Per capita beef consumption is down by 35% in the US since the
| 70s. From 62kg/person/year to 35.
|
| Beef produces ~100kg CO2 per kg of meat. That's a reduction of
| 27,000kgs of CO2 reduction, per capita.
|
| That's not nothing. By simply reducing beef consumption by 1
| kilogram a month, you can prevent more than a metric ton of
| CO2. If 5% of Americans cut 1 kilo of beef a month, that'd
| knock out 15 million tons of CO2.
|
| Small changes can have an impact on aggregate, and just because
| someone else is not making those changes doesn't excuse us
| looking at ourselves and saying, "I could choose something else
| this time".
| deepsun wrote:
| And 80% of all the trash in the oceans come from fishing
| industry (e.g. abandoned nets).
| maeil wrote:
| This is nothing but head-in-the-sand, arms-in-the-air, feel-
| good baloney to convince oneself to sleep well at night.
|
| Guess what happens when you buy a used laptop instead of a new
| one?
|
| That's right: _less "standard practice overseas
| manufacturing"_.
|
| Lifestyle change right there.
|
| Buying less, using the same for longer, buying used goods
| instead of new are lifestyle changes that anyone can make and
| have an undeniable very clear impact by reducing the amount of
| stuff that needs to get made. Using my smartphone for 6 years
| instead of changing every 3 years doesn't mean the one I didn't
| buy gets sold elsewhere. It means _one less sale_.
| nameless_me wrote:
| I have always felt this way too. Our personal choices do not
| move the needle on fossil fuel and plastics. One could embrace
| aversion to these out of a sense of sustainability to signal
| virtue, but lets not pretend it will save the planet. It won't.
| Restricting aviation flights, stopping wars and minimizing the
| dirty fuel used in maritime freight does much more. But the
| world will not do it.
| kalaksi wrote:
| While I agree in general, my opinion is that customer choices
| do also matter and can move the needle, slowly, with larger
| cultural change.
|
| Personally, trying to make better choices, big or small,
| isn't about "virtue signalling". It's about acknowledging the
| issues and living according to ones values.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Do we talk about pollution or emmissions?
| rolftheperson wrote:
| This line of thinking is what undermines democracies and ruins
| the environment. Your choice might just be a drop in the ocean,
| but guess what the ocean is made out of.
| frankzander wrote:
| Finally someone who speaks this out. What we do is more or less
| fly poop ... good four own well being but with almost zero
| impact. I'll go on doing some things because I think that some
| of that are the better ways to handle this or that or it's
| better for my health but with no expectation that I'll change
| anything.
| bjohnson225 wrote:
| This reads like an attempt to pass the blame to others. Per
| capita CO2 emissions in the US are one of the highest in the
| world, and significantly higher than those in China or SEA.
| This is despite the US/Europe moving some of our
| dirtiest/cheapest manufacturing to that region.
|
| Personal choices matter. See the amount of energy used on air
| conditioning in the US compared to areas of Europe with
| comparable weather for a banal example. If we want to
| significantly reduce emissions it will happen through a
| combination of personal choices, corporate action and
| government policy.
| sofixa wrote:
| One of the most imminent problems with the environment isn't
| due to plastic pollution (which is of course terrible, might
| well have unforseen ramifications via micro plastics, and is
| impacting negatively biodiversity), but CO2 and other gases
| impacting climate.
|
| While we should strive to fix both, it's more important in the
| short term to limit the amount of CO2 pollution before it's too
| late.
| pointedAt wrote:
| well, it's really not about the destruction of the planet but
| making our habitat more hostile and humans more sick.
|
| sure, STEM will continue to find remedies and cures but at some
| point we're fucked just because the gene pool was reduced to an
| unnaturally selected bunch that survived & thrived completely
| alienated from the actual world.
|
| sure, no biggie, wahaha, that's the name of the game, the old
| will die, the young repeat the same nonsense and that
| microbiome and all that other stuff we carry with us as hosts,
| potentially most likely in a beneficial symbiotic relationship,
| have no implicit mechanisms to cancel the contract and pivot
| towards some species or other that won't be d u m b enough to
| shit all over it's own home & garden, consequently ruining the
| bio-chemistry with the smell, taste and look of feces
| everywhere - in the body as well as outside - and all that
| while it's getting a bit hot in here.
|
| and I doubt that the consequences of controlled demise in a
| deteriorating environment all while the meds and drugs of
| leadership and the people fade out quite a few of the brains
| and the bodies implicit reactions to a lot of sensory
| perceptions to everything that was vital, crucial to notice for
| a 'million' years can't be projected to at least some degree. I
| mean "blindspots" are a thinking tool, after all, but those
| thinking brains and minds believe in black swans and the better
| angels of our nature so that doesn't really mean a thing.
|
| the population itself is fine, a habit of psycho-social
| education and all consecutive upper levels being insanely
| afraid of competition and insights from below. thing is,
| whatever financial survival schemes people are running, they
| all have death cult written all over their faces.
|
| btw, most of this was for fun, I'm really not worried at all.
| climate change is more a cycle than man-made acceleration. my
| only point of interest is the deterioration of the species due
| to all the things that we do and then worry more about the
| habitat than our and all kinds.
|
| we absolutely can turn the planet into a conservatory. through
| any climate.
| marhee wrote:
| Regarding the immediate effect I am sure your point is valid.
| But it's also a bit of a cynical point of view, wouldn't you
| say? People make these statements and pursue these personal
| lifestyle decisions because of their dreams for a better future
| - not its immediate effect. Just as companies need a vision to
| succeed, societies need vision as well. If a lot of people are
| vocal about something and live it, it has a chance of becoming
| anchored in laws and so force companies to do the "right
| thing". Regulation follows collective values.
| wisty wrote:
| I think this is wrong.
|
| Descriptively / "objectively" if you make your demand cleaner,
| you decrease demand for dirty consumption. You can't say
| individuals don't matter by comparing them to the world, that's
| invalid.
|
| Normatively, is it a useful lie? Maybe, to some extent. People
| are lazy, selfish, and stupid. Peter Singer points out that we
| might be nice to people nearby, but we don't give money to
| people starving in other countries even if we think it will
| make a real difference. And no human can really know how even a
| pencil is made, so we make poor decisions. A carbon tax would
| unleash the free market on the problem. But saying individuals
| can't act is not good leadership, if even the people who say
| they want to fix the issue won't make personal sacrifices, why
| should the average voter?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| "Personal impact" is just laundering the responsibility of
| government and corporations so it looks like it's our fault.
|
| It is true that everyone everywhere all at once could suddenly
| make the right decision forever and save the planet. But is a
| statistical anomaly so extreme it's not worth pursuing as a
| policy. No policy maker worth their salt would look at that and
| consider it valid long term.
|
| We have a playbook. We refuse to use it. We ban products, and
| then the companies that refuse to change or cheat get
| shuttered, and we move on.
| yesbut wrote:
| This guy must work at Microsoft.
| scottcha wrote:
| Yet 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 would hold for AI as a whole or
| when you convert the electricity use to emissions.
|
| I'm personally on the side that the ROI will probably work out in
| the long run but not by minimizing the potential impact and
| keeping the focus on how we can make this technology (currently
| in its infancy) more efficient. [edit wording]
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| That was already done years ago and people are predicting
| that the grid will be maxed out soon.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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?
| wmf wrote:
| They'll have to build new power generation and build the
| data centers next to it.
| sitkack wrote:
| You are massively conflating what is possible with what
| is done.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I know data centers are built next to wind farms for
| these reasons already. We have an abundance of those
| projects out here in the PNW.
| scottcha wrote:
| 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.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 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.
| scottcha wrote:
| Two reasons that I understand 1. not all these AIs are
| LLMs and many have much lower latency SLAs than chat and
| 2. These are just one part of a service architecture and
| when you have multiple latencies across the stack they
| tend to have multiplicative effects.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| If you look at a model with a diverse competitive
| provider set like llama 3 the latency is 1/4 second, and
| it will definitely improve at a minimum incrementally if
| quality is held constant: https://artificialanalysis.ai/m
| odels/llama-3-3-instruct-70b/... Remember that as long as
| you experience the response linearly (very much the case
| for audio output for eg) then the first-chunk latency is
| your actual latency, not to stream the entire response.
| wmf wrote:
| Voluntary conservation was only working by accident and guilt
| tripping never works. The grid needs to become clean so that we
| can have new industries.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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
| environmentalism since...well I'll let you know when it
| stops.
| andymasley wrote:
| I made a point in the post to say that it's better to
| mostly ignore your personal carbon footprint and focus on
| systematic change, but that I was writing the post for
| people who still wanted to reduce their consumption anyway
| fmbb wrote:
| The grid being clean means not having any fossil power. We
| can only get there by shutting down all fossil fuel power
| plants.
|
| We can not get there by adding new power generation.
| celticninja wrote:
| Well you need the latter to replace the former. So you need
| to add new power generation to allow you to shut down
| fossil fuel plants.
|
| And to be honest what we need to do is replace them with
| nuclear power stations to manages the base load of nations
| power requirements. Either that or much better power
| storage is required
| caseyy wrote:
| > We can only get there by shutting down all fossil fuel
| power plants. We can not get there by adding new power
| generation.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1433498-no-take-only-throw
|
| "No add new power plants, only transform our grid to
| greener".
| shafyy wrote:
| 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 of their unnecessary video calls and emails is, I
| would argue, not important.
|
| But once again, the fundamental issue is late-stage
| capitalism.
| mritterhoff wrote:
| 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?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I kind of agree with this sentiment , though we haven't
| reached 100% renewable ...
| advael wrote:
| Isn't that kind of a non-sequitur? The claim made was
| that renewable energy would still be a finite resource to
| some degree. It's possible that the available energy
| surplus will be too big for any decisions about usage to
| matter, but that's a strong claim and you're doing
| nothing to make it here.
|
| A lot of people believe in a higher power. If trusting in
| this supposed "market" brings you comfort and clarity in
| a complicated world, I do not begrudge you it. But
| invoking it doesn't address the claim it's answering
|
| It's also clear that "the market" does not care enough
| about environmental impact to even do stuff like remove
| the current significant fossil fuel subsidies present in
| most government budgets, nor stop individuals or
| organizations from consuming or selling said fuels,
| natural gas, or plastic products at massive scales, so
| it's unclear why it would allocate energy in a way that
| didn't deprive crucial priorities.
|
| Like the theodicy on the invisible hand's problem of
| environmental collapse ain't lookin' good is all I'm
| saying
| curvaturearth wrote:
| Having LLMs everywhere haven't helped me much, it just gets
| in the way.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Why do you belive this? Datacenter uses just a 1-1.3 percent of
| electricity from grid and even if you suppose AI increased the
| usage by 2x(which I really doubt), the number would still be
| tiny.
|
| Also AI training is easiest workload to regulate, as you can
| only train when you have cheaper green energy.
| kolinko wrote:
| I also had doubts, but asked chat and it confirms it's an
| issue - including sources.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/678b6b3e-9708-8009-bcad-8ba84a5145.
| ..
|
| The issue is that they are often localised, so even if it's
| just 1% of power, it can cause issues.
|
| Still, by itself, grid issues don't mean climate issues. And
| any argument complaining about a co2 cost should also
| consider alternative cost to be reliable. Even if ai was
| causing 1% or 2% or 10% of energy use, the real question is
| how much it saves by making society more efficient. And even
| if it wasn't, it's again more of a question about energy
| companies polluting with co2.
|
| Microsoft, which hosts OpenAI, is famously amazing in terms
| of their co2 emissions - so far they were going way beyond
| what other companies were doing.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| What do you mean by confirms the issue? What's the issue
| exactly?
| oneplane wrote:
| The issue is that when you have a high local usage your
| grid loses the ability to respond to peaks since that
| capacity is now always in use. Essentially it raises the
| baseline use which means your elasticity is pretty much
| gone.
|
| A grid isn't a magic battery that is always there, it is
| constantly fluctuating, regardless of the intent of
| producers and consumers. You need to be able to have
| enough elasticity to deal with that fact. Changing that
| is hard (and expensive), but it is the only way (such as
| the technical reality).
|
| The solution is not to create say, 1000 extra coal-fired
| generating facilities since you can't really turn them on
| or off at will. Same goes for gas, nuclear etc. You'd
| need a few of them for your baseline load (combined with
| other sources like solar, wind, hydro, whatever) and then
| make sure you have your non-renewable sources have margin
| and redundancy and use storage for the rest. This was
| always the case, and it will always be the case.
|
| But now with information technology, the degree to which
| you can permanently raise demand on the grid to an
| extreme degree is where the problem becomes much more
| apparent. And because it's not manufacturing (which is an
| extreme consumer of energy) you don't really get the "run
| on lower output" option. You can't have an LLM do "just a
| little bit of inferencing". Just like you can't have your
| Netflix send only half a movie to "save power".
|
| In the past we had the luxury of nighttime lower demand
| which means industry could up their usage, but
| datacenters don't sleep at night. And they also can't
| wait for batch processing during the day.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Except neither ChatGPT and nor sources say this. First
| source says:
|
| > Gas-fired generation could meet data centers' immediate
| power needs and transition to backup generation over
| time, panelists told the Northwest Power and Conservation
| Council.
|
| What you are saying has nothing to do with local, but has
| to do with large abrupt changes in electricity usage, and
| datacenter electricity usage is generally more
| predictible and smooth than most other industry.
| oneplane wrote:
| I'm not talking about fluctuations (i.e. a datacenter
| with fluctuating usage). I'm taking about adding a
| datacenter to an existing grid. That significantly
| changes the baseline load on the grid, and that is a
| local problem because transmission is not universally
| even across an entire grid.
|
| If your transmission line is saturated, it doesn't matter
| how much more generation you add on the source end, it's
| not gonna deliver 'more' over the transmission lines.
|
| And that is just a simplistic local example, because it's
| not a single producer, single consumer, single
| transmission line scenario. ChatGPT and the article
| aren't diving in to that. The closest they might get is
| congestion but even then you already have to know the
| issue to be able to ask about it.
|
| As far as the article itself is involved here, this tread
| mostly goes into the reason why global usage percentages
| doesn't mean there are no problems. It's like saying
| gerrymandering has no impact because of some percentages
| elsewhere.
| baobun wrote:
| ChatGPT didn't "confirm" anything there. It is not a
| meaninful reference.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Just build nuclear.
| namesbc wrote:
| That doesn't solve the problem
| jenadine wrote:
| Indeed, it doesn't solve the problem that people will
| misinterpret data and spread misinformation to justify their
| bad feeling about AI with invalid arguments.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| In my country there's a lot of institutional hype about green
| algorithms. I find the whole idea quite irrelevant (for the
| reasons explained in this post) but of course, it's a way to get
| funding for those of us who work in AI/NLP (we don't have much
| money for GPUs and can't do things like training big LLMs, so
| it's easy to pitch everything we do as "green", and then get
| funding because that's considered strategic and yadda yadda).
|
| It's funny, but sad, how no one calls the billshit because we
| would be sabotaging ourselves.
| namesbc wrote:
| Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims.
| Can it keep up the ruse?:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-cent...
| simonw wrote:
| The absolute best thing I've read on this subject is this article
| here: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-generative-ai-the-
| powe...
|
| It talks at great length about data center trends relating to
| generative AI, from the perspective of someone who has been
| deeply involved in researching power usage and sustainability for
| two decades.
|
| I made my own notes on that piece here (for if you don't have a
| half hour to spend reading the original):
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/12/generative-ai-the-powe...
| strogonoff wrote:
| I find the following to be a great point regarding what we
| ought to consider when adapting our lifestyle to reduce
| negative environmental impact:
|
| > In deciding what to cut, we need to factor in both how much
| an activity is emitting and how useful and beneficial the
| activity is to our lives.
|
| The further example with a hospital emitting more than a cruise
| ship is a good illustration of the issue.
|
| Continuing this line of thought, when thinking about your use
| of an LLM like ChatGPT, you ought to weigh not merely its
| emissions and water usage, but also the larger picture as to
| how it benefits the human society.
|
| For example: Was this tech built with ethically sound
| methods[0]? What are its the foreseeable long-term effects on
| human flourishing? Does it cause a detriment to livelihoods of
| the many people while increasing the wealth gap with the tech
| elites? Does it negatively impact open information sharing
| (willingness to run self-hosted original content websites or
| communities open to public, or even the feasibility of doing
| so[1][2]), motivation and capability to learn, creativity? And
| so forth.
|
| [0] I'm not going to debate utilitarianism vs. deontology here,
| will just say that "the ends justify the means" does not strike
| me as a great principle to live by.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42486481
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624
| OlivOnTech wrote:
| Hello Simon,
|
| You mention that
|
| > Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon all have net-zero emission
| targets which they take very seriously, making them "some of
| the most significant corporate purchasers of renewable energy
| in the world". This helps explain why they're taking very real
| interest in nuclear power.
|
| Nuclear is indeed (more or less) zero-emission, but it's not
| renewable.
|
| Thank you for the synthesis and link to the original article,
| it's a good read!
| devmor wrote:
| In the same way that leaving food out doesn't create a cockroach
| infestation.
| sirnicolaz wrote:
| What about training it?
| ternnoburn wrote:
| "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.
| XorNot wrote:
| Except that's not the point of this: the point is that humans
| have absolutely finite time to think about problems, and so the
| way you distract from a problem is by inventing a new more
| exciting one.
|
| LLMs are in the news cycle, so sending all the activists after
| LLMs sure does a good job ensuring they're not going after
| anything which would be more effective doesn't it? (setting
| aside my thoughts for the moment of the utility of the 'direct
| action' type activists who I think have been useless for a good
| long while now - there could not possibly be _more_ 'awareness'
| of climate change).
| ternnoburn wrote:
| Then again, if you can stall a nascent polluter before it
| becomes entrenched, maybe that's the right time to intervene.
| Getting people to not eat meat is hard, we've been eating
| meat forever. Getting people to not use LLMs? That's where
| most of us were up until very recently.
| XorNot wrote:
| "Don't use LLMs" is just another variant of "don't use
| electricity".
|
| Reframe the problem like that and then realize that no
| one's going to do it: global electricity use is constantly
| increasing. Fortunately, global renewable energy use is
| also growing incredibly rapidly.
|
| Which problem seems more tractable? Because reality has
| already proven it: people will happily switch to clean
| electricity and keep using electricity. They won't
| voluntarily use less electricity unless they get some
| benefit from that - i.e. reduced expenditure, or just plain
| more stuff (i.e. my LED lights consume a fraction of the
| power of my previous halogens, but are brighter and I have
| more of them and also can change light color on a
| schedule).
| croes wrote:
| Maybe because we didn't make real progress in the existing
| pollution and have a greater chance stopping a new polluter.
|
| How long are climate change and its reasons known?
|
| In the end people vote climate change deniers because they
| don't like the inconvenient truth
| titanomachy wrote:
| The major players in AI are collectively burning 1-2 gigawatts,
| day and night, on research and development of the next generation
| of LLMs. This is as much as my city of a million people. The
| impact is real, and focusing on inference cost per query kind of
| misses the point. Every person who uses these tools contributes
| to the demand and bears some of the responsibility. Similar to
| how I have responsibility for the carbon emissions of a flight,
| even if the plane would have flown without me.
|
| I'm saying this as someone who finds LLMs helpful, and uses them
| without feeling particularly guilty about it. But we should be
| honest about the costs.
| nharada wrote:
| Agreed, I feel like the main response seems to be "Does Not!",
| but it's reasonable to accept that a thing you like has a cost.
| We all emit carbon every day to do things we don't 100% need,
| and we should just be willing to admit there's a cost and try
| and move towards paying them.
|
| Personally, I'm not tripping too hard about datacenter energy
| long term because it's very easy to make carbon free (unlike
| say ICE cars or aircraft). But it would be nice to see some
| efforts to incentivize green energy for those datacenters
| instead of just saying "whatever" and powering them with coal.
| simonw wrote:
| "But it would be nice to see some efforts to incentivize
| green energy for those datacenters instead of just saying
| "whatever" and powering them with coal."
|
| The major datacenter operators all have very aggressive
| targets for clean energy which they have been mostly sticking
| to.
|
| Google: https://sustainability.google/progress/energy/
|
| AWS: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/products-
| services/aws...
|
| Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-
| infrastruct...
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Enforce a global carbon tax, price it in, and tax the land
| LeonB wrote:
| International tax agreements are crucial if any progress is to
| be made on preventing climate disaster.
|
| Which major parties support it? Who is even talking about it?
|
| It's such an obviously needed mechanism, but hard to get anyone
| enthused about it.
|
| This group have some proposals on the topic --
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_the_Taxation...
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Comparing magnitudes does not prove the headline, poor analysis.
| croes wrote:
| The use of ChatGPT doesn't replace the others it comes on top of
| that.
|
| MS is missing its CO2 targets because of AI not because of
| burgers.
|
| The whole argument is, it's not bad because other things are
| worse.
|
| We are racing towards the abyss but don't worry AI only
| accelerates a little more.
| folken wrote:
| "personal carbon footprint" is a term invented by BP and is the
| single hack that derailed the environment discussion by making
| people personally responsible and removing the actual polluters
| from the discussion.
| asmor wrote:
| The article could indeed be written by the same kind of people,
| given it glances over training cost as if AI companies aren't
| pushing datacenter power/gpu capacities to the limit to produce
| incrementally better models by brute force. It all falls apart
| as soon as you stop individualizing the numbers and add back in
| all of the supposedly non-recurring (but actually recurring
| because we can't stop ourselves from redoing it) cost.
| gunian wrote:
| A lot of conversations regarding the environment feel so
| frustrating because they are either qualitative or use aggregate
| high level data or are like we'll be dead in 50 years (lol my
| personal favorite)
|
| Why not start capturing waste/energy data for all human made
| items like nutritional data on food? It won't add much overhead
| or stifle economies as people fear
|
| That way when I log in to use any online service or when I
| buy/drive a car or when I buy an item I can see how much energy
| was consumed and how much waste I produced exactly
| lhl wrote:
| I published this as a comment as well, but it's probably worth
| nothing that the ChatGPT water/power numbers cited (the one that
| is most widely cited in these discussions) comes from an April
| 2023 paper (Li et al, arXiv:2304.03271) that estimates
| water/power usage based off of GPT-3 (175B dense model) numbers
| published from OpenAI's original _GPT-3 2021 paper_. From Section
| 3.3.2 Inference:
|
| > As a representative usage scenario for an LLM, we consider a
| conversation task, which typically includes a CPU-intensive
| prompt phase that processes the user's input (a.k.a., prompt) and
| a memory-intensive token phase that produces outputs [37]. More
| specifically, we consider a medium-sized request, each with
| approximately <=800 words of input and 150 - 300 words of output
| [37]. The official estimate shows that GPT-3 consumes an order of
| 0.4 kWh electricity to generate 100 pages of content (e.g.,
| roughly 0.004 kWh per page) [18]. Thus, we consider 0.004 kWh as
| the per-request server energy consumption for our conversation
| task. The PUE, WUE, and EWIF are the same as those used for
| estimating the training water consumption.
|
| There is a slightly newer paper (Oct 2023) that directly measured
| power usage on a Llama 65B (on V100/A100 hardware) that showed a
| 14X better efficiency. [2] Ethan Mollick linked to it recently
| and got me curious since I've recently been running my own
| inference (performance) testing and it'd be easy enough to just
| calculate power usage. My results [3] on the latest stable vLLM
| from last week on a standard H100 node w/ Llama 3.3 70B FP8 was
| almost a 10X better token/joule than the 2023 V100/A100 testing,
| which seems about right to me. This is without fancy look-ahead,
| speculative decode, prefix caching taken into account, just raw
| token generation. This is 120X more efficient than the commonly
| cited "ChatGPT" numbers and 250X more efficient than the
| Llama-3-70B numbers cited in the latest version (v4, 2025-01-15)
| of that same paper.
|
| For those interested in a full analysis/table with all the
| citations (including my full testing results) see this o1 chat
| that calculated the relative efficiency differences and made a
| nice results table for me:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/678b55bb-336c-8012-97cc-b94f70919d...
|
| (It's worth point out that that used 45s of TTC, which is a point
| that is not lost on me!)
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03003
|
| [3] https://gist.github.com/lhl/bf81a9c7dfc4244c974335e1605dcf22
| pluc wrote:
| Using it, sure, now do operating it and building it.
| palata wrote:
| > and it's completely clear to me that one side is getting it
| entirely wrong and spreading misleading ideas
|
| What a great way to start an article. I get it as: "I am not open
| to listening to your arguments, and in fact if you disagree with
| me, I will assume that you are a moron".
|
| It reminds me of people saying "planes are not the problem:
| actually if you compare it to driving a car, it uses less energy
| per person and per km". Except that as soon as you take a
| passenger in your car, the car is better (why did you assume that
| the plane was full and the car almost empty?). And that you don't
| remotely drive as far with your car as you fly with a plane.
| Obviously planes are worse than cars. If you need to imagine
| people commuting by car to the other side of the continent to
| prove your point, maybe it's not valid?
|
| The fact is that the footprint of IT is increasing every year.
| And quite obviously, LLMs use more energy than "traditional"
| searches. Any new technology that makes us use more energy is bad
| for environment.
|
| Unless you don't understand how bad the situation is: we have
| largely missed the goal of keeping global warming to 1.5C
| (thinking that we could reach it is absurd at this point). To
| keep 2C, we need to reduce global emissions by 5% every year.
| That's a Covid crisis every year. Let's be honest, it probably
| won't happen. So we'll go higher than 2C, fine. At the other end
| of the spectrum, 4C means that a big stripe (where _billions_ of
| people live) around the equator will become unlivable for human
| beings (similar to being on Mars: you need equipment just to
| survive outside). I guess I don 't need to argue how bad that
| would be, and we are currently going there. ChatGPT is part of
| that effort, as a new technology that makes us increase our
| emissions instead of doing the opposite.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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 keeping global warming to
| 1.5C (thinking that we could reach it is absurd at this point).
|
| Probably, yes; last year passed the threshold -- it would be a
| pleasant _*surprise*_ if that turned out to have been a fluke
| 14* years early.
|
| * 14 because it would take 14 years for the exponential -- seen
| for the last 30 years -- for PV to replace all forms of power
| consumption; not just electricity, everything. But even then
| we'd also need to make rapid simultaneous progress with non-
| energy CO2 sources like cattle and concrete.
|
| > around the equator will become unlivable for human beings
| (similar to being on Mars: you need equipment just to survive
| outside)
|
| In so far as your bracket, sure; but there's a huge gap in what
| equipment you would need.
|
| The comparison I often make is that Mars combines the moisture
| of the Sahara, the warmth of the Antarctic, the air pressure of
| the peak of Mount Everest, and the soil quality of a superfund
| cleanup site, before then revealing that it's actually worse on
| all counts.
| palata wrote:
| > 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 threshold
|
| That, plus the IPCC scenario that keeps us under 1.5C says
| that in a few decades, not only we won't be extracting any
| carbon anymore, but we will be pumping carbon underground
| faster than we are extracting it now! And that's with the
| IPCC models which tend to be optimistic (we measure that
| every year)!
|
| > 14 because it would take 14 years for the exponential --
| seen for the last 30 years -- for PV to replace all forms of
| power consumption
|
| And you would have to take into account that PV today
| _entirely relies on oil_. We are going towards a world with
| less and less oil, and we don 't know how it will impact our
| capacity of production for PVs. But probably it won't help.
|
| > In so far as your bracket, sure; but there's a huge gap in
| what equipment you would need.
|
| Sure. It was a quick way to say that the combination of
| humidity and temperature will be such that sweating won't
| help humans regulate their temperature. And when we can't
| regulate our temperature, we die. 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).
|
| Now of course that would be infinitely better than trying to
| live on Mars, which is why it is preposterous to even
| consider Mars.
| thih9 wrote:
| Perhaps off topic, what exactly does the "one way european
| flight" mean in the context of avoiding co2 emissions? I.e. what
| is the choice or scenario here?
| dvorack101 wrote:
| Number are wrong. Just trying on topic. Data centers and AI
| realty consumes a lot more resources that you article poses.
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| Why did this get flagged?
| returningfory2 wrote:
| I emailed hn@ to try to find out, I've no idea why.
| andymasley wrote:
| Hey all I wrote this post. To clear up a few points:
|
| I meant this post to tell individuals that worrying about the
| emissions they personally cause using ChatGPT is silly, not that
| AI more broadly isn't using a lot of energy.
|
| I can't really factor in how demand for ChatGPT is affecting the
| future of AI. If you don't want to use ChatGPT because you're
| worried about creating more demand, that's more legit, but worry
| about the emissions associated with individual searches right now
| on their own is a silly distraction.
|
| One criticism is that I didn't talk about training enough. I
| included a section on training in the emissions and water
| sections, but if there's more you think I should address or
| change I'm all ears. Please either share them in the comments on
| the post or here.
|
| I saw someone assumed I'm an e/acc. I'm very much not and am
| pretty worried about risks from advanced AI. Had hoped the link
| to an 80,000 Hours article might've been a clue there.
|
| Someone else assumed I work for Microsoft. I actually exclusively
| use Claude but wanted to write this for a general audience and
| way fewer people know about Claude. I used ChatGPT for some
| research here that I could link people to just to show what it
| can do.
| celticninja wrote:
| This used to be the stick they used to beat bitcoin with. I guess
| it's a good stick because you can hit any technology with it and
| you can conveniently forget all the terrible uses to which
| electricity is put.
| originalvichy wrote:
| Where in the world are you getting the numbers for how much video
| streaming uses energy? I am quite sure that just as with LLMs,
| most of the energy goes into the initial encoding of the video,
| and nowadays any rational service encodes videos to several
| bitrates to avoid JIT transcoding.
|
| Networking can't take that much energy, unless perhaps we are
| talking about purely wireless networking with cell towers?
| oneplane wrote:
| LLM Inference is still quite power-hungry, Video decoding with
| hardware acceleration is much more efficient.
|
| But we can do some estimates, heck, we can even ask GPT for
| some numbers.
|
| Say you want to do 30 minutes of video (h265) or 30 minutes of
| LLM inferencing on a generic consumer device, ignoring the
| source of the model or source of encoded video, you get about
| 4x difference: Energy usage for 30 minutes of
| H.265 decoding: ~15-20 Wh. Energy usage for 30 minutes of
| Llama3 inference: ~40-60 Wh.
|
| This is optimised already, so a working hardware H.265 decoder
| is assumed, and for inferencing, something on the level of an
| RTX 3050, but can also be a TPU or NE.
|
| While not the most scientific comparison, it's perhaps good to
| know that video decoding is practically always local, and for
| streaming services it will use whatever is available and might
| even switch codecs (i.e. AV1, H.265, H.264 depending on what is
| available, and what licenses are used). And if you have older
| hardware, some codecs won't even exist in hardware, to the
| point where you start doing software decoding (very
| inefficient).
|
| AI inferencing is mostly remote (at least the heavy loads) in a
| datacenter because local availability of hardware is pretty hit
| and miss, models are pretty big and spinning one up every time
| you just wanted to ask something is not very user friendly.
| Because in a datacenter you tend to pay for amperage per rack,
| you spec your AI inferencing hardware to eat that power since
| you're not saving any money or hardware life when you don't use
| it. That means that efficiency is important (more use out of a
| rack) but scaling/idling isn't really that big of a deal (but
| it has slowly dawned on people that burning power 'because you
| can' is not really a great model). That AI inferencing in a
| datacenter is more power-hungry as a result, because they can,
| because it is faster, and that's what attracts users.
|
| I would estimate that the local llama3 inferencing uses less
| power than when done in a datacenter, because there simply is
| less power available locally (try finding an end-user device
| that is used mass-market with enough power available, you
| won't; only small markets like gaming PCs and workstations will
| do).
| semiquaver wrote:
| 20 Wh for 30 minutes of hardware accelerated h265 decoding is
| an order of magnitude too high at any bitrate. Please cite
| your sources.
| oneplane wrote:
| As I wrote in my reply, I don't have "sources".
|
| Pure decode excluding any other requirements is probably
| pretty low, but running a decoder isn't all you need.
| There's network, display, storage and RAM so your OS can
| run etc. There will probably be plenty of variation
| (brightness, environment, how you get your stream in since
| a 5G modem is probably going to be different energy-wise
| compared to WiFi or Ethernet), and if you have something
| like a decoder in the CPU or in the GPU and if that GPU is
| separate, more PCIe involvement etc. But we can still
| estimate:
|
| Hardware decoding (1080p video): ~5-15 W for the CPU/GPU
|
| Overall system power usage (screen, memory, etc.): ~25-45 W
| for a typical laptop.
|
| Duration (30 minutes): If we assume an average of 35 W
| total system power, the energy consumption is:
|
| Energy = 35W x 0.5h ours = 17.5 Wh
|
| We can do a similar one for inference, also recognising
| you'll have variations either way:
|
| CPU inference: ~50 W. GPU inference: ~80 W. Overall system
| power usage: ~70-120 W for a typical laptop during LLM
| inference.
|
| Duration (30 minutes): Assuming an average of 100 W total
| system power:
|
| Energy = 100W x 0.5 hours = 50Wh
|
| We could pretend that our own laptop is very good at some
| of these tasks, but we're not taking about the best
| possible outcome, we're talking about the fact that there
| is a difference between decoding a video stream and doing
| LLM inference, and the fact that that difference is big
| enough to make someone's point that video streaming is
| somehow 'worse' or 'as bad as' LLM usage moot. Because it's
| not. LLM training and LLM inference eats way more energy.
|
| Edit: looking at some random search engine results, you get
| a bunch of reddit posts with screenshots from people asking
| where the power consumption goes on their locally running
| LLM inferencing: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/commen
| ts/17vr3uu/what_ex...
|
| It seems their local usage hovers around 100W. Other
| similar posts hover around the same, but it seems to be
| throttle based as other machines with faster chips also
| throttle around the same power target while delivering
| better performance. Most local models use a quantised model
| which is less resource-hungry, the cloud-hosted models tend
| to use much larger (and thus more hungry models).
|
| Edit2: looking at some real-world optimised decoding
| measurements, it appears you can decode VP9 and H.265 on 1
| year old hardware below 200mW. So not even 1W. That would
| mean LLM inferencing is orders of magnitude more power
| hungry than video decoding. Either way: LLM power usage >
| Video Decode power usage, so the article trying to put them
| in the same boat is nonsense.
| simonw wrote:
| "I would estimate that the local llama3 inferencing uses less
| power than when done in a datacenter, because there simply is
| less power available locally"
|
| Is this taking into account the fact that datacenter
| resources are shared?
|
| Llama 3 on my laptop may use less power, but it's serving
| just me.
|
| Llama 3 in a datacenter or more expensive, more power-hungry
| hardware is potentially serving hundreds or thousands of
| users.
| liontwist wrote:
| Luckily we don't have to do such a calculation. All this energy
| use will be factored into cost which tells us which is using
| more resources.
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| Ah yes high tech, an industry where there's famously no weird
| distorting influence from VCs subsidizing unprofitable
| business models to grab market share.
| liontwist wrote:
| It doesn't matter that you are paying for, someone's paying
| for it, and that economizing force always is putting
| pressure on.
| alganet wrote:
| 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 incredibly stupid and inneficient.
|
| I know what you're thinking right now: fine-tuning, etc. That is
| the "reusable" analogy to that, is it not? But fine-tuning is
| far, far from reusability (the major players don't even care
| about it that much). It's not even on the "hopper" stage.
|
| _Stop training new shit, and the argument becomes valid. How
| about that?_
|
| ---
|
| I am sure the more radical environmentalists know that LLMs can
| be eco-friendly. The point is: they don't believe it will go that
| way, so they fight it. I can't blame them, this has happened
| before.
|
| _This monster was made by environment promises that were not
| met_. If they're not met again, the monster will grow and there's
| nothing anyone can do about it. I've been more moderate than this
| article in several occations and still got attacked by it. If not
| LLMs, it will target something else. Again, can't blame them.
| simonw wrote:
| > LLMs are useless (for one of their main purposes) if the
| models get stale.
|
| I don't think that's entirely accurate. A lot of people
| deliberately continue to chose to use the older GPT-4 despite
| it not being updated since June 2023.
|
| GPT-4o has had releases in May, August and November of 2024 -
| so about one every 3-4 months.
|
| Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet was released in June and had a
| single update in October.
|
| Personally I'd rather have a model with excellent summarization
| / tool using abilities that can look up recent facts about the
| world.
| paulcole wrote:
| Anyone who says that LLMs are terrible for the environment will
| never be swayed from that belief.
|
| It is like a new shibboleth for idiocy.
|
| When someone says it just reply with, "I see" and move on with
| your life.
| crakhamster01 wrote:
| One miss in this post is that the author tries to make their
| point by comparing energy consumption of LLMs to arbitrary points
| of reference. We should be comparing them to their relevant
| parallels.
|
| Comparing a ChatGPT query to an hour long Zoom call isn't useful.
| The call might take up ~1700 mL of water, but that is still
| wildly more efficient than what we used to do prior -
| travel/commute to meet in person. The "10x a Google search" point
| is relevant because for many of the use cases mentioned in this
| post and others like it (e.g. "try asking factual questions!"),
| you could just as easily get that with 1 Google search and
| skimming the results.
|
| I have found use for LLMs in software development, but I'd be
| lying if I said I couldn't live without it. Almost every use case
| of an LLM has a simple alternative - often just employing
| critical thinking or learning a new skill.
|
| It feels like this post is a long way of saying "yes, there are
| negative impacts, but I value my time more".
| andymasley wrote:
| I basically do think that at some threshold it's important to
| weigh your time against negative impacts. I personally avoid
| taking flights whenever I can because of the climate and think
| that's worth my time relative to the emissions saved, but I
| also never worry about optimizing the energy use of my digital
| clock because that would take too much time relative to the
| emissions I could save. ChatGPT exists somewhere between those
| two things, and my argument in the post is that it's much
| closer to the digital clock.
| Retric wrote:
| On a logarithmic scale, it's closer to the flight.
|
| Flying 1000 miles commercially only represents about 10
| gallons of fuel.
| andymasley wrote:
| 10 gallons of fuel's worth of energy could be used to ask
| ChatGTP 100,000 questions (assuming 3 Wh per question) or
| power a digital clock (1-2 W) for 35 years. If you assume
| you ask ChatGPT 8 questions per day, it's using exactly as
| much energy as a digital clock. Personal use of ChatGPT is
| much closer to the clock.
| Retric wrote:
| The marginal difference of someone sitting or not sitting
| on a specific flight isn't 10 gallons of fuel. It's the
| capacity of the entire aircraft making that trip / number
| of passengers that gives 10 gallons on average because if
| more people make a trip eventually you need an extra
| aircraft.
|
| So on an apples to apples comparison ChatGPT including
| training, hardware, etc uses a fuck of a lot more than
| just 3 Wh per question.
| andymasley wrote:
| The training cost adds a minuscule amount to the marginal
| cost of each search. The best sources I can find on
| training GPT-4 say it used 50 GWh of energy to train.
| GPT-4 is being used for a lot more than ChatGPT, but even
| if we assume that ChatGPT is all it's used for if we
| divide the total cost of energy by the total number of
| ChatGPT searches it increases the cost of each search by
| 10% (I go into this in the post) raising the marginal
| cost including training from 3 Wh to 3.1 Wh.
| baobun wrote:
| Sorry but this doesn't add up and it's not fixable
| because the argument is broken and I doubt the numbers
| are even in the right order of magnitude when considered
| in context. (That's before considering that it also had
| the effect of you writing and sharing this post - what's
| the second-order-effecf of people seeing it increasing
| their use as result of that and resharing the same idea
| with their peers etc? What's the network effect of your
| digital clock?)
|
| You are rationalizing your laziness in an attempt to cope
| with the negative effects that you truly deep down know
| are there.
| andymasley wrote:
| If I'm going to be accused of rationalizing my laziness I
| need at least one source saying my numbers are off. I'm
| going off the numbers provided by environmentalist
| critics of ChatGPT. I hope that by sharing my post people
| feel exactly as guilty about using ChatGPT as they do
| about buying one additional digital clock.
| simonw wrote:
| Sounds to me like you're rationalizing your laziness in
| researching and sharing more accurate numbers because you
| want to justify "the negative effects that you truly deep
| down know are there".
|
| You appear to be arguing based on vibes.
| Retric wrote:
| Not so fast, billions of investment wasn't spent on just
| 50 GWh of electricity.
|
| The final step of training one specific model might have
| used 50 GWh which only costs what 0.011 billion? What the
| fuck do you think they are spending the rest of that
| money on?
|
| And what do you think environmental impact of that
| spending was?
| andymasley wrote:
| Most of that money went into infrastructure + human
| talent, with energy costs at the tail end. I'd be happy
| to include the energy costs of producing the materials,
| feeding the humans and moving them around etc. but those
| aren't usually included in environmentalist critiques of
| the energy used in training. I couldn't use the original
| article to unpack every possible interpretation of how
| much energy was used without it turning into a book. If
| we did the same for plane rides we'd also need to include
| the energy cost of assembling the planes, training and
| feeding the human pilots etc.
| jraph wrote:
| > feeding the humans
|
| You shouldn't include this, because they would exist and
| eat anyway, and probably the same thing (unless, maybe,
| their habits are changed).
| Retric wrote:
| Fair enough, I'm not saying you have to do the analysis.
|
| I was working from a rough order of magnitude estimate
| from their spending and calling their numbers BS.
|
| Airlines are a better studied industry so you can find
| academic literature or use direct fuel costs which is a
| large enough cost you can get fairly close just using it
| alone.
| marcelsalathe wrote:
| A very nice article. But the google search and LLM energy
| estimates are outdated. More recent work put both at 10x less.
|
| https://engineeringprompts.substack.com/p/does-chatgpt-use-1...
| andymasley wrote:
| Yup I decided to go with the worst estimates given by
| environmentalist critics of ChatGPT to try to show that even
| there it doesn't seem like a problem.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I am pretty sure that everybody else has pointed out but the
| training costs should also be accounted I suppose?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-18 23:01 UTC)