Is it just me or is that stupid way to measure consuming computing power? The CPUs themselves doing computations do not produce any pollutants (unless you calculate how much of that is created during manufacturing ang logistics, which I doubt). It's the (without question stupidly large) energy consumption which might, but big players are at least greenwashing their actions by using renewable energy more and more.

Why not create comparison like "generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day" or something more easily to compare.

Yes, blame the consumers yet again when we all know corporations are the biggest climate offenders.

I’m somewhat in agreement I think. Is it really me talking to ChatGPT about the Holographic Theory in quantum mechanics, and why the Mac version of Brother’s P-Touch software is such trash, that are destroying the environment? Or is it the soulless corporate CEOs laying off thousands of customer service reps in order to replace them with AI bots, that are really consuming all the energy? Not to mention all the lives they have directly and more immediately destroyed with their decisions.

What a stat.

Sometimes i go 50 times further then other times.

It kinda depends on where i am going.

Some llms have a deepsearch feature where it goes trough 400+ webpages taking multiple minutes. But usually i just need it to rewrite part of an email.

Yes but those stupid prompts also cost Spam Altman money… which makes my cold iron heart glow.

Nothing costs Altman a dime. He's been playing with House Money since day one.

What is crazy is that Microsoft kept cutting this con artist billion dollar check after billion dollar check, only for him to squander it on The Machine That Makes Creepy Studio Ghibli Knock-Offs.

Why not create comparison like “generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day” or something more easily to compare.

Because its still bullshit. The bulk of the utilization of these LLMs isn't going to your 1000 word Princess Leia/Dianna Troy lesbian romance. They're going to some call center in the Philippines blowing up your cell with automated voice-to-text phone calls and a bargain basement Netflix animation studio experimenting with AI generated children's cartoons.

Once again, we have a giant Business Factory spewing out enormous plums of waste to produce things nobody asked for. Then we're getting an Op-Ed from some know-nothing hack on the greenwashing beat to tell their readers "Um, aktuly, these skyrocketing emissions are because you asked Alexa to add kidney beans to your shopping list." And I will put even money odds on this Op-Ed, itself, being AI generated.

When you do 0 AI prompts, they all cause the same amount of emissions, which is 0.

Not really, this is more like an obvious statement like "certain activities like sports may cause you to burn twice the calories. Yeah, doh.

Because it really doesn’t. For most tasks, it would require more human energy to do the work than an LLM, just because we are much slower at it than an AI. I mean, humans operate at around 80 W just by existing (basal metabolic rate).

If the AI is powered by renewables, it’s cleaner than humans. If it’s powered by fossil fuels, it’s likely much worse (though I haven’t run the calculations).

Now obviously, this presumes that the output of an AI is even valuable at all, which is often not the case.

Because its still bullshit.

Obviously. But I have no context on how much my actions create co2 in the first place. I assume driving a car generates a majority of it, or maybe heating the house, but I still don't have any clue how many kilograms that might be. But what I do know is how many kilowatts my house consumes electricity and at least roughly how much our appliances use, so if you want to try and blame me for consuming precious resources by generating text or watching a video at least give me an measurement I can easily comprehend.

Always remember to say please and thank you

Why not create comparison like "generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day" or something more easily to compare.

Considering that you can generate 1000 words in a single prompt to ChatGPT, the energy to do that would be about 0.3Wh.

That's about as much energy as a typical desktop would use in about 8 seconds while browsing the fediverse (assuming a desktop consuming energy at a rate of ~150W).

Or, on the other end of the spectrum, if you're browsing the fediverse on Voyager with a smartphone consuming energy at a rate of 2W, then that would be about 9 minutes of browsing the fediverse (4.5 minutes if using a regular browser app in my case since it bumped up the energy usage to ~4W).

Recycling 2: Electric Bugaloo

Does this also apply to AI models I run locally on my computer?

That’s cool. Not my problem to solve.

Generally, heating and cooling are the main energy consumption for domestic purposes. next up is the car, and then electrical consumption. (from what i remember).

as long as you don't take a transatlantic trip your fine:

"For example, having DeepSeek R1 (70 billion parameters) answer 600,000 questions would create CO2 emissions equal to a round-trip flight from London to New York. Meanwhile, Qwen 2.5 (72 billion parameters) can answer more than three times as many questions (about 1.9 million) with similar accuracy rates while generating the same emissions."

i don't know y'all, but i can say it takes me a long-ass time to ask that many questions.

just to set the record straight:

"For example, having DeepSeek R1 (70 billion parameters) answer 600,000 questions would create CO2 emissions equal to a round-trip flight from London to New York. Meanwhile, Qwen 2.5 (72 billion parameters) can answer more than three times as many questions (about 1.9 million) with similar accuracy rates while generating the same emissions."

i'd say that makes the average usage for personal reasons an non-issue.

That's a good question no one else seems to be asking. When you run local prompts, you're using more battery on your laptop or power from your PSU, but both of those are limited by their relatively small power consumption (when compared to server farms). Therefore, it could be likened to encoding heavy video or exporting complex blender models. Are you using more electricity? Yes. Is it city-eroding amounts more? Not even close.