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I basically do think that at some threshold it's important to weigh your time against negative impacts. I personally avoid taking flights whenever I can because
by andymasley 2y ago
I basically do think that at some threshold it's important to weigh your time against negative impacts. I personally avoid taking flights whenever I can because of the climate and think that's worth my time relative to the emissions saved, but I also never worry about optimizing the energy use of my digital clock because that would take too much time relative to the emissions I could save. ChatGPT exists somewhere between those two things, and my argument in the post is that it's much closer to the digital clock.
- Retric 2y agoOn a logarithmic scale, it’s closer to the flight. Flying 1000 miles commercially only represents about 10 gallons of fuel.
- andymasley 2y ago10 gallons of fuel's worth of energy could be used to ask ChatGTP 100,000 questions (assuming 3 Wh per question) or power a digital clock (1-2 W) for 35 years. If you assume you ask ChatGPT 8 questions per day, it's using exactly as much energy as a digital clock. Personal use of ChatGPT is much closer to the clock.
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- Retric 2y agoThe marginal difference of someone sitting or not sitting on a specific flight isn’t 10 gallons of fuel. It’s the capacity of the entire aircraft making that trip / number of passengers that gives 10 gallons on average because if more people make a trip eventually you need an extra aircraft. So on an apples to apples comparison ChatGPT including training, hardware, etc uses a fuck of a lot more than just 3 Wh per question.
- andymasley 2y agoThe training cost adds a minuscule amount to the marginal cost of each search. The best sources I can find on training GPT-4 say it used 50 GWh of energy to train. GPT-4 is being used for a lot more than ChatGPT, but even if we assume that ChatGPT is all it's used for if we divide the total cost of energy by the total number of ChatGPT searches it increases the cost of each search by 10% (I go into this in the post) raising the marginal cost including training from 3 Wh to 3.1 Wh.
- baobun 2y agoSorry but this doesn't add up and it's not fixable because the argument is broken and I doubt the numbers are even in the right order of magnitude when considered in context. (That's before considering that it also had the effect of you writing and sharing this post - what's the second-order-effecf of people seeing it increasing their use as result of that and resharing the same idea with their peers etc? What's the network effect of your digital clock?) You are rationalizing your laziness in an attempt to cope with the negative effects that you truly deep down know are there.
- andymasley 2y agoIf I'm going to be accused of rationalizing my laziness I need at least one source saying my numbers are off. I'm going off the numbers provided by environmentalist critics of ChatGPT. I hope that by sharing my post people feel exactly as guilty about using ChatGPT as they do about buying one additional digital clock.
- simonw 2y agoSounds to me like you're rationalizing your laziness in researching and sharing more accurate numbers because you want to justify "the negative effects that you truly deep down know are there". You appear to be arguing based on vibes.
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