Comment by zdragnar
18 hours ago
The title does not match the content.
A more appropriate title is "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in comparison to everything else."
But, given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the article itself doesn't need to exist.
> "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in comparison to everything else."
Emissions directly caused by Average Joe using ChatGPT is not significant compared to everything else. 50,000 questions is a lot for an individual using ChatGPT casually, but nothing for the businesses using ChatGPT to crunch data. 50,000 "questions" will be lucky to get you through the hour.
Those businesses aren't crunching data just for the sake of it. They are doing so ultimately because that very same aforementioned Average Joe is going to buy something that was produced out of that data crunching. It is the indirect use that raises the "ChatGPT is bad for the environment" alarm. At very least, we at least don't have a good handle on what the actual scale is. How many indirect "questions" am I asking ChatGPT daily?
> given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the article itself doesn't need to exist.
Why? I regularly hear people trying to argue that LLMs are an environmental distaster.
Because LLMs are an environmental disaster.
It's not about any individual usage. It's the global technology that is yet to prove to be useful and that already have bad for the environment.
Any new usage should be free of impact on the environment.
(Note: The technology of LLM itself is not an environmental disaster, but how it is put in use currently isn't the way).
> yet to prove to be useful
I don’t understand this perspective. It should be abundantly clear at this point that these systems are quite useful for a variety of applications.
Do they have problems? Sure. Do the AI boosters who breathlessly claim that the models are super intelligent make me cringe? Sure.
But saying that they’re not useful is just downright crazy.
3 replies →
> It's the global technology that is yet to prove to be useful
Useful for whom, by what definition? I personally find it very useful for my day to day work, whether it be helping me write code, think through ideas, or otherwise.
3 replies →
The article needs to exist because the idea that ChatGPT usage is environmentally disastrous really has started to make its way into the human hive mind.
I'm glad someone is trying to push back against that - I see it every day.
Learning a new model (like GPT-4) is way more costly than running it.