Technology

idk if that's the intended takeaway from those numbers.

According to AllAboutAI analysis, global AI processing generates over 260,930 kilograms of CO₂ monthly from ChatGPT alone, equivalent to 260 transatlantic flights, with 1 billion daily queries consuming 300 MWh of electricity.

according to the faa there are on average 5500 planes in the air every day, and while i couldn't find an exact number there seem to be between 350 and 1 200 transatlantic flights every day, depending on season.

260 tons is still massive, but let's not kid ourselves. it's about equivalent to producing 12 new american-size cars.

Which is why I threw up in my mouth a little when my boss said we all need to be more bullish on AI this morning.

Your article doesn’t even claim that. Do you have any idea just how carbon intensive a flight is?

OP, this statement is bullshit. you can do about 5 million requests for ONE flight.

i'm gonna quote my old post:

I had the discussion regarding generated CO2 a while ago here, and with the numbers my discussion partner gave me, the calculation said that the yearly usage of ChatGPT is appr. 0.0017% of our CO2 reduction during the covid lockdowns - chatbots are not what is kiling the climate. What IS killing the climate has not changed since the green movement started: cars, planes, construction (mainly concrete production) and meat.

The exact energy costs are not published, but 3Wh / request for ChatGPT-4 is the upper limit from what we know (and thats in line with the appr. power consumption on my graphics card when running an LLM). Since Google uses it for every search, they will probably have optimized for their use case, and some sources cite 0.3Wh/request for chatbots - it depends on what model you use. The training is a one-time cost, and for ChatGPT-4 it raises the maximum cost/request to 4Wh. That's nothing. The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households. This is for one of the most downloaded apps on iPhone and Android - setting this in comparison with the massive usage makes clear that saving here is not effective for anyone interested in reducing climate impact, or you have to start scolding everyone who runs their microwave 10 seconds too long.

Even compared to other online activities that use data centers ChatGPT's power usage is small change. If you use ChatGPT instead of watching Netflix you actually safe energy!

Water is about the same, although the positioning of data centers in the US sucks. The used water doesn't disappear tho - it's mostly returned to the rivers or is evaporated. The water usage in the US is 58,000,000,000,000 gallons (220 Trillion Liters) of water per year. A ChatGPT request uses between 10-25ml of water for cooling. A Hamburger uses about 600 galleons of water. 2 Trillion Liters are lost due to aging infrastructure . If you want to reduce water usage, go vegan or fix water pipes.

Read up here !

It's so important to differentiate between commercial LLMs and AI as a general concept.

The emoji usage, heading & bold text pattern makes me certain the article was written using AI.

It also pollutes the mind of ignorant people with misinformation. Not that that is anything new. But I do think objective truth is very important in a democratic society. It reminds me of that video that used to go around that showed Sinclair Broadcasting in like 20 some different 'local' broadcast news all repeating the same words verbatim. It ended with 'This is extremely dangerous to our democracy'. With AI being added to all the search engines, it is really easy to look something and unknowingly get bombarded with false info pulled out of the dregs of internet. 90% of people don't verify the answer to see if it is based in reality.

Makes me wonder what they are doing to reach these figures.
Because I can run many models at home and it wouldn't require me to be pouring bottles of water on my PC, nor it would show on my electricity bill.

Yeah, AI is shit and a massive waste of energy, but it's NOTHING compared to the energy usage of the airline industry.

What does it mean to consume water? Like it's used to cool something and then put back in a river? Or it evaporates? It's not like it can be used in some irrecoverable way right?

I did some research and according to some AI's this is true. According to some other AI's this is false.

Bitcoin or crypto?