[HN Gopher] Mistral reports on the environmental impact of LLMs
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Mistral reports on the environmental impact of LLMs
Author : Kydlaw
Score : 22 points
Date : 2025-07-22 19:09 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mistral.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (mistral.ai)
| greyadept wrote:
| I would really like it if an LLM tool would show me the power
| consumption and environmental impact of each request I've
| submitted.
| preciz wrote:
| And each toilet flush you make should also have a Co2
| calculation which should go against your daily carbon
| allowance.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| Spending drinking water for toilet flushes is indeed a
| problem. Perhaps not CO2 measurements directly, but informing
| people in general of how much high quality water is wasted on
| flushes alone will hopefully bring more momentum into more
| efficient flushing mechanism and introducing grey water
| systems to new and old buildings alike. Good idea!
| j-pb wrote:
| people downvote your sarcasm, but if you do the calculations
| you're kinda right.
|
| 1Kg of Beef costs: - The energy equivalent of
| 60.000 ChatGPT queries. - The water equivalent of
| 50.000.000 ChatGPT queries.
|
| Applied to their metric Mistral Large 2 used:
| - The water equivalent of 18.8 Tons of Beef. - The CO2
| equivalent of 204 Tons of Beef.
|
| France produces 3836 Tons of Beef per day,
|
| and one large LLM per 6 months.
|
| So yeah, maybe use ChatGPT to ask for vegan recipes.
|
| People will try to blame everything else they can get a hold
| on before changing the stuff that really has an impact, if it
| means touching their lifestyle.
|
| The LLMs are not the problem here.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| The difference is that food is important and live-giving
| and LLMs are a very fancy magic 8-ball
| j-pb wrote:
| You don't need beef, beef is a lifestyle choice.
|
| I use LLMs to do all of my coding these days, it's
| certainly more essential for feeding me than beef.
| leksak wrote:
| Also a lifestyle choice
| j-pb wrote:
| Yes but one with a much much much smaller impact as we
| just demonstrated.
|
| This is exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance in
| people that I meant.
|
| You literally see the math and go "but I like my meat,
| why should I give that up if you got your AI".
|
| Because, as I just demonstrated, my AI takes a
| infinitesimal fraction of your meat.
|
| It literally takes you only going vegan for a day to
| offset your entire AI usage of a year.
| jrflowers wrote:
| This is spot on because there can't be two issues that
| exist simultaneously. There can only be one thing that
| wastes enormous amounts of energy and that thing is beef
| jrflowers wrote:
| This is a good point because being curious about energy usage
| is the same thing as advocating for an imaginary rule about
| energy usage
| stonogo wrote:
| Toilets are already labeled with their usage rate.
| jiehong wrote:
| Let's call it GreenOps
| jeffbee wrote:
| That would be ... thousands of time less useful than giving you
| the same information at the motor fuel pump. Unfortunately this
| isn't one of those situations where every little bit counts.
| There are 2 or 3 things you can do to reduce your environmental
| impact and not using chatbots isn't one of the things.
| jiehong wrote:
| So, using the smallest model for the task would help, as
| expected.
|
| A very small model could run on device to automatically switch
| and choose the right model based on the request. It would help
| navigate the difficult naming of each model of each vendor for
| sure.
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(page generated 2025-07-22 23:00 UTC)