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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 heat

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-predicts-substantial-energy-consumption-for-ai-workloads-globally/ https://www.powerelectronicsnews.com/schneider-electric-pred...

deleted 2y ago
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BeetleB 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  Not knowing what it's being spent on is separate to knowing whether it's being spent
  - chefandy 2y ago
    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-drive-160-increase-in-power-demand https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
simonw 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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/theferocity.bsky.social/post/3lfckq43qnc2j https://bsky.app/profile/theferocity.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 2y ago
      > 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-ChatGPT-Crawler-Reflective-DDOS-Vulnerability.md 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 2y ago
      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.
jonas21 2y ago
> However articles like this must link to references. There are links to sources for every piece of data in the article.
- blharr 2y ago
  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/#:~:text=A%20recent%20study%20by%20the,emissions%20of%20an%20average%20car https://icecat.com/blog/is-ai-truly-a-sustainable-choice/#:~.... which refers to this article https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/06/239031/training-a-single-ai-model-can-emit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in-their-lifetimes/ 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 2y ago
    If I understand TFA correctly that's a claim it's covering and arguing against, not arguing for.
    - blharr 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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).
  - 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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BeetleB 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
Not knowing what it's being spent on is separate to knowing whether it's being spent
- chefandy 2y ago
  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-drive-160-increase-in-power-demand https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...

simonw 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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/theferocity.bsky.social/post/3lfckq43qnc2j https://bsky.app/profile/theferocity.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 2y ago
    > 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-ChatGPT-Crawler-Reflective-DDOS-Vulnerability.md 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 2y ago
    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.

jonas21 2y ago

> However articles like this must link to references. There are links to sources for every piece of data in the article.

blharr 2y ago
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/#:~:text=A%20recent%20study%20by%20the,emissions%20of%20an%20average%20car https://icecat.com/blog/is-ai-truly-a-sustainable-choice/#:~.... which refers to this article https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/06/239031/training-a-single-ai-model-can-emit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in-their-lifetimes/ 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 2y ago
  If I understand TFA correctly that's a claim it's covering and arguing against, not arguing for.
  - blharr 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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).
- 2y ago