People seem to miss the specific thing that was controversial about this paper: The paper gives inaccurate estimates of the carbon dioxide emissions that result

People seem to miss the specific thing that was controversial about this paper: The paper gives inaccurate estimates of the carbon dioxide emissions that result from machine learning. My understanding is that this is the main reason why Google wanted the paper pulled. You can't have a paper by Google authors saying incorrect things about how much CO2 Google is emitting. The authors refused. They argued that they gave a citation for their numbers, and it's not their problem if the paper they cite is inaccurate. Eventually Google did publish a response: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.05149 https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.05149 But this got totally buried...