Comment by adrithmetiqa
4 hours ago
I wonder how much co2 is being thrown into the atmosphere everyday through the steady stream of “look what I made this LLM do” and endless “benchmarking”?
Sigh
4 hours ago
I wonder how much co2 is being thrown into the atmosphere everyday through the steady stream of “look what I made this LLM do” and endless “benchmarking”?
Sigh
One useful hint here is the API token cost - in this case "about $74 in API tokens" for Opus 5.5.
We know Anthropic run inference at a margin, so that $74 means that the cost of the electricity involved is substantially less than $74. I'd love to know the actual cost there.
I wonder how you only reach $74 in 6 hour runtime. I would have guessed this runtime goes into the hundreds of dollars.
Or I'm realizing that I'm overpaying my tokens...
A lot of that 6 hours isn't spent waiting for the models to return tokens, it's spent executing the code that they've written.
Approximately nothing - the carbon cost of electricity is already very low, and most of the inference costs are GPU and datacenter amortization. You could require all AI inference to be carbon-neutral and that'd barely raise the API prices.
I wonder how much co2 you use to get through the day, and how much you use to remark on other people's creations in a way that suggests you disapprove of their utilization of their available resources. How much co2 do your projects emit, since you seem to be interested in those metrics?
I strongly suspect one HN post (or two now) is not even in the same ballpark. I could ask Claude to figure it out but that would be a complete waste of time and energy. ;)
This has given me a great idea: I have a modest proposal on how to reduce net CO2 emissions while not reducing token consumption at all
USE carbon dioxide to get through the day? What?! We're not plants!
I assure you that if your body did not emit co2 throughout the day you would not continue metabolic processes for an especially long period.
[flagged]
> I wonder how much co2 you use to get through the day
What a terrible thing to say to human! Being (presumably) human, it is their inalienable, natural-born right to do so.
Shame on you.
Intuitively I'd say that just-for-fun AI projects emit orders of magnitude less CO2 than what just-for-fun road trips or air travel emit.
So unless you can show that it approaches all the other frivolous consumption that humans love to waste resources on, maybe we can get back to experimenting with cool technology and talking about it, on this website called "Hacker News"?