An individual user's model usage is negligible, in that you should not feel bad about querying an LLM unless you feel approximately 1000 times worse about drink

An individual user's model usage is negligible, in that you should not feel bad about querying an LLM unless you feel approximately 1000 times worse about drinking a cup of coffee. But Google/Microsoft provide services for hundreds of millions, or even billions, of users. In the same way, if your service was hairdryers (owing to progress in hot-air-over-IP) and you had 300 million users, you'd need 300 million * 2000W * 10 minutes = 100000MWh daily, or about 5 copies of the nuclear power plant the Microsoft are opening. You could look at it as those hairdryer power plants already effectively existing, just distributed as a small portion of many plants.