Just read through your link and the journal it uses as a source. While the journal seems fine, the article itself makes claims that are not backed up by the journal and does not seem to cite any other sources for those claims. For instance, the claim that LLMs use 1.5L of water per 100 word reply seems to have been pulled out of thin air.
Sorry, are you sure you’re replying to the right person?
Please see my other comment about energy / water usage. Aside from that, I’m not disputing your other points.
Relevant except:
–
ChatGPT is bad relative to other things we do (it’s ten times as bad as a Google search)
If you multiply an extremely small value by 10, it can still be so small that it shouldn’t factor into your decisions.
If you were being billed $0.0005 per month for energy for an activity, and then suddenly it began to cost $0.005 per month, how much would that change your plans?
A digital clock uses one million times more power (1W) than an analog watch (1µW). “Using a digital clock instead of a watch is one million times as harmful to the climate” is correct, but misleading. The energy digital clocks use rounds to zero compared to travel, food, and heat and air conditioning. Climate guilt about digital clocks would be misplaced.
The relationship between Google and ChatGPT is similar to watches and clocks. One uses more energy than the other, but both round to zero.
When was the last time you heard a climate scientist say we should avoid using Google for the environment? This would sound strange. It would sound strange if I said “Ugh, my friend did over 100 Google searches today. She clearly doesn’t care about the climate.” Google doesn’t add to our energy budget at all. Assuming a Google search uses 0.03 Wh, it would take 300,000 Google searches to increase your monthly energy use by 1%. It would be a sad meaningless distraction for people who care about the climate to freak out about how often they use Google search. Imagine what your reaction would be to someone telling you they did ten Google searches. You should have the same reaction to someone telling you they prompted ChatGPT.
What matters for your individual carbon budget is total emissions. Increasing the emissions of a specific activity by 10 times is only bad if that meaningfully contributes to your total emissions. If the original value is extremely small, this doesn’t matter.
It’s as if you were trying to save money and had a few options for where to cut:
You buy a gum ball once a month for $0.01. Suddenly their price jumps to $0.10 per gum ball.
You have a fancy meal out for $50 once a week to keep up with a friend. The restaurant host likes you because you come so often, so she lowers the price to $40.
It’s very unlikely that spending an additional $0.10 per month is ever going to matter for your budget. Spending any mental energy on the gum ball is going to be a waste of time for your budget, even though its cost was multiplied by 10. The meal out is making a sizable dent in your budget. Even though it decreased in cost, cutting that meal and finding something different to do with your friend is important if you’re trying to save money. What matters is the total money spent and the value you got for it, not how much individual activities increased or decreased relative to some other arbitrary point.
Google and ChatGPT are like the gum ball. If a friend were worried about their finances, but spent any time talking about foregoing a gum ball each month, you would correctly say they had been distracted by a cost that rounds to zero. You should say the same to friends worried about ChatGPT. They should be able to enjoy something that’s very close to free. What matters for the climate is the total energy we use, just like what matters for our budget is how much we spend in total. The climate doesn’t react to hyper specific categories of activities, like search or AI prompts.
If you’re an average American, each ChatGPT prompt increases your daily energy use (not including the energy you use in your car) by 0.001%. It takes about 1,000 ChatGPT prompts to increase your daily energy use by 1%. If you did 1,000 ChatGPT prompts in 1 day and feel bad about the increased energy, you could remove an equal amount of energy from your daily use by:
Running a clothes drier for 6 fewer minutes.
Running an air conditioner for 18 fewer minutes.
Edit: It’s interesting how this snippet always gets downvoted without explanation. Let’s not be like the crazies. Acknowledge the facts even if you don’t like the technology.
Source for the claim on using less water than YouTube or Netflix (or even walking, for that matter)
Using chatbots emits the same tiny amounts of CO2 as other normal things we do online, and way less than most offline things we do. Even when you include “hidden costs” like training, the emissions from making hardware, energy used in cooling, and AI chips idling between prompts, the carbon cost of an average chatbot prompt adds up to less than 1/150,000th of the average American’s daily emissions. Water is similar. Everything we do uses a lot of water. Most electricity is generated using water, and most of the way AI “uses” water is actually just in generating its electricity. The average American’s daily water footprint is ~800,000 times as much as the full cost of an AI prompt. The actual amount of water used per prompt in data centers themselves is vanishingly small.
Because chatbot prompts use so little energy and water, if you’re sitting and reading the full responses they generate, it’s very likely that you’re using way less energy and water than you otherwise would in your daily life. It takes ~1000 prompts to raise your emissions by 1%. If you sat at your computer all day, sending and reading 1000 prompts in a row, you wouldn’t be doing more energy intensive things like driving, or using physical objects you own that wear out, need to be replaced, and cost emissions and water to make. Every second you spend walking outside wears out your sneakers just a little bit, to the point that they eventually need to be replaced. Sneakers cost water to make. My best guess is that every second of walking uses as much water in expectation as ~7 chatbot prompts. So sitting inside at your computer saves that water too. It seems like it’s near impossible to raise your personal emissions and water footprint at all using chatbots, because using all day on something that ends up causing 1% of your normal emissions is exactly like spending all day on an activity that costs only 1% of the money you normally spend.
There are no other situations, anywhere, where we worry about amounts of energy and water this small. I can’t find any other places where people have gotten worried about things they do that use such tiny amounts of energy. Chatbot energy and water use being a problem is a really bizarre meme that has taken hold, I think mostly because people are surprised that chatbots are being used by so many people that on net their total energy and water use is noticeable. Being “mindful” with your chatbot usage is kind of like filling a large pot of water to boil to make food, and before boiling it, taking a pipet and removing tiny drops of the water from the pot at a time to “only use the water you need” or stopping your shower a tenth of a second early for the sake of the climate. You do not need to be “mindful” with your chatbot usage for the same reason you don’t need to be “mindful” about those additional droplets of water you boil.
as average new car prices pass $50k, maybe people are less likely to have multiple cars than in the past
You’re quoting this on a car selling for about $15k?
Most of the people in this post complaining about the range obviously aren’t EV owners. I’ve just done a multi-country road trip covering thousands of km. Taking a 20 minute break every few hours is hardly arduous, you’d be doing something similar on your own anyway.
It’s really easy. Step one, fire up chatgpt.
Your complaint has been marked as a duplicate.
Warranty void once assembled.
Unpopular opinion of the day: LLMs are a distraction from the climate fight.
Using chatbots emits the same tiny amounts of CO2 as other normal things we do online, and way less than most offline things we do. Even when you include “hidden costs” like training, the emissions from making hardware, energy used in cooling, and AI chips idling between prompts, the carbon cost of an average chatbot prompt adds up to less than 1/150,000th of the average American’s daily emissions. Water is similar. Everything we do uses a lot of water. Most electricity is generated using water, and most of the way AI “uses” water is actually just in generating its electricity. The average American’s daily water footprint is ~800,000 times as much as the full cost of an AI prompt. The actual amount of water used per prompt in data centers themselves is vanishingly small.
Because chatbot prompts use so little energy and water, if you’re sitting and reading the full responses they generate, it’s very likely that you’re using way less energy and water than you otherwise would in your daily life. It takes ~1000 prompts to raise your emissions by 1%. If you sat at your computer all day, sending and reading 1000 prompts in a row, you wouldn’t be doing more energy intensive things like driving, or using physical objects you own that wear out, need to be replaced, and cost emissions and water to make. Every second you spend walking outside wears out your sneakers just a little bit, to the point that they eventually need to be replaced. Sneakers cost water to make. My best guess is that every second of walking uses as much water in expectation as ~7 chatbot prompts. So sitting inside at your computer saves that water too. It seems like it’s near impossible to raise your personal emissions and water footprint at all using chatbots, because using all day on something that ends up causing 1% of your normal emissions is exactly like spending all day on an activity that costs only 1% of the money you normally spend.
There are no other situations, anywhere, where we worry about amounts of energy and water this small. I can’t find any other places where people have gotten worried about things they do that use such tiny amounts of energy. Chatbot energy and water use being a problem is a really bizarre meme that has taken hold, I think mostly because people are surprised that chatbots are being used by so many people that on net their total energy and water use is noticeable. Being “mindful” with your chatbot usage is kind of like filling a large pot of water to boil to make food, and before boiling it, taking a pipet and removing tiny drops of the water from the pot at a time to “only use the water you need” or stopping your shower a tenth of a second early for the sake of the climate. You do not need to be “mindful” with your chatbot usage for the same reason you don’t need to be “mindful” about those additional droplets of water you boil.
🤮
Forget reddit and forget spez
Butt thermometers
Looks like outsourcing good management of public resources to “greed” to fix inefficiencies.
Pretty much. The only upside is we’re getting more return on less dollar from this particular instance of outsourcing. I’m well aware that’s not always the case.
Why is some greedy fuck with delusions of grandeur needed here?
It’s not, and it would be nice if the human race ever figures out a system for fair and equitable allocation of resources. But we haven’t yet, so here we are stuck between corrupt politicians and greedy billionaires.
I’m fine with national space programs and whatnot.
Are you aware of just how much of NASA’s budget was being drained for bullshit ‘cost+’ contracts with Boeing et al?
Elon sucks, but spacex has progressed space tech significantly, at a much lower cost than before.
National space programs are great, but the US turned them into a kickbacks program.
Do you think rockets burn unicorn farts and exhaust pixie dust?
By that logic, pretty much any activity we do exacerbates the crisis. The climate is not being fucked because we’re launching rockets, save your passion for those issues where it actually matters.
we do not want to “start manufacturing in space”
Speak for yourself.
We have crises here that are only exacerbated by this dumb need to send people to space.
The human race is capable of doing more than one thing at a time. That we aren’t working on solving our many crises has nothing to do with whether or not we’re in space. You’re tying together two issues that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
“The work that we’re doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today,” says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge.
Interesting. Having something that can only be manufactured in space would be a real motivation to getting off our asses and back up there.
I guess this is the blockchain detailing ownership of the idea?
I’ve read through the sources and links, and there is sanity checking and 3rd party input. The numbers from Google were also published in a white paper, so there’s a reasonable level of transparency and verifiability. While they shouldn’t be taken entirely at their word, there’s currently little reason to think their figures aren’t at least in the ballpark of the actual data.