Comment by andymasley
2 months ago
The 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.
Not so fast, billions of investment wasn’t spent on just 50 GWh of electricity.
The final step of training one specific model might have used 50 GWh which only costs what 0.011 billion? What the fuck do you think they are spending the rest of that money on?
And what do you think environmental impact of that spending was?
Most of that money went into infrastructure + human talent, with energy costs at the tail end. I'd be happy to include the energy costs of producing the materials, feeding the humans and moving them around etc. but those aren't usually included in environmentalist critiques of the energy used in training. I couldn't use the original article to unpack every possible interpretation of how much energy was used without it turning into a book. If we did the same for plane rides we'd also need to include the energy cost of assembling the planes, training and feeding the human pilots etc.
Fair enough, I’m not saying you have to do the analysis.
I was working from a rough order of magnitude estimate from their spending and calling their numbers BS.
Airlines are a better studied industry so you can find academic literature or use direct fuel costs which is a large enough cost you can get fairly close just using it alone.
> feeding the humans
You shouldn't include this, because they would exist and eat anyway, and probably the same thing (unless, maybe, their habits are changed).
Sorry 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.
Sounds 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.
If 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.