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 threadScott PerryOct 18, 2024
@simon People seem to be especially concerned about water usage, but I feel like that can be straightforwardly converted to an electricity/CO₂ estimate using the equivalent number of BTUs provided by heat pumps based on the local energy mix. It ignores some trends (the overall mix is clearly trending towards more renewables over time), but likely good enough for a thought experiment.
Show threadfuricleOct 18, 2024
@numist @simon how can water usage ( which is only reversed by months or years of environmental filtering if at all ) be compared to energy?
If there's no clean water to drink, the electricity won't help....
Show threadScott Perry

@furicle Datacenters are using water for cooling, which makes the water consumed for that purpose fungible with other inputs that are capable of fulfilling the same purpose. If @simon is inclined to come up with a CO₂ number that represents "the cost of AI" then including cooling makes that number fully representative.

(Also, it seems possible that evap cooling may become less common as popular awareness of the inequities of water rights in this country appears to have reached critical mass?)

Oct 18, 2024 at 8:52pmWeb