Simon WillisonOct 18, 2024

The environmental comparison I'd be interested in seeing is between a year of heavy personal usage of LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini etc) compared to the CO2 emissions from a single passenger flight

Can I do my own personal carbon offsetting by skipping one trip a year?

Does that question even make sense?

Show threadnickaltOct 18, 2024
@simon Cost is a pretty direct an fair/accurate comparison of CO2 emissions for this (and everything really). A flight is mostly the cost of burning fuel, and LLM usage is mainly the cost of electricity. You're almost certainly not using more than a plane ticket's worth of electricty in a year of LLM usage. Datacenters are also more likely to get their electricity from low carbon sources, which works even more in their favor.
Show threadfuricle
@nickalt @simon no it certainly is not fair to use cost!
There's no justification for that
Oct 18, 2024 at 8:22pmTusky
Show threadDanielOct 19, 2024

@furicle @nickalt Exactly, and for two reasons specifically

1) We can just assume all those AI/LLM companies are VC subsidized right now, and

2) The costs on the environment are externalized and not prices in.

It's similar to how beef can be so cheap, because you're not paying for the degraded labd, for the animal abuse, for the bio-diversity loss, for the agro-chemicals destroying our soils, and so on.

Show threadnickaltOct 19, 2024
@djh @furicle Agree about externalities wrt beef. CO2 does have a cost (it may be too low, but it does have one), so it's fair to compare LLMs and flights on cost. If a VC-sponsored AI company is actually spending $10 per query and only charing the customer $0.05, the cost is misleading, but that AI company was going to spend/lose that money anyway.