> 1. Different energy sources produce varyings of co2 Yes. > 2. This likely does not include co2 to make the GPUs or machines Definitely not, nobody does tha

> 1. Different energy sources produce varyings of co2 Yes. > 2. This likely does not include co2 to make the GPUs or machines Definitely not, nobody does that. Wish they did, in general I feel like a lot of beliefs around sustainability and environmentalism are wrong or backwards precisely because embodied energy is discounted; see e.g. stats on western nations getting cleaner, where a large - if not primary - driver of improved stats is just outsourcing manufacturing, so emissions are attributed to someone else. Anyway, embodied energy isn't particularly useful here. Energy embodied in GPUs and machines amortizes over their lifetimes and should be counted against all the things those GPUs did, do and will do, of which the training in question is just a small part. Not including it isolates the analysis to contributions from the specific task per se, and makes the results applicable to different hardware/scenarios. > 3. Humans involved are not added to this at all, and all of the impact they have on the environment This metric is so ill-defined as to be arbitrary. Even more so with conjunction with 2, as you could plausibly include a million people into it. > 4. No ability to predict future co2 from using this work. Total, no. Contribution of compute alone given similar GPU-hours per ton of CO2eq, yes.