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 threadJohan Wärlander 🦀Oct 18, 2024

@simon I think that the way forward here isn't to try and write it off as personal responsibility. Instead, put the focus where it belongs -- on the tech companies building, training & supplying models.

Demand (or better, regulate) that any power used for AI / LLM must come fully from investment by said companies into renewable energy sources, and that they must build out 25% extra capacity to feed back into the grid, beyond what they use.

Show threadAlexander WinklerOct 18, 2024
@jwarlander @simon definitely a good idea. But shoudn't similar regulation be applied to any other industry as well. What makes ai special (honest question)?
Show threadJohan Wärlander 🦀Oct 18, 2024
@awinkler @simon Oh, absolutely correct. At this point, any increased energy usage in any industry should be treated the same.
Show threadAlexander WinklerOct 18, 2024
@jwarlander @simon but as long as this is not the case I think the argunent specifically against ai is rather weak. Don't get me wrong: I wish people had to pay for environmental externalities, I just don't think ai is special and ai being over-hyped doesn't render every criticism unconditionally valid.
Show threadJohan Wärlander 🦀Oct 18, 2024

@awinkler @simon Within the tech industry, AI seems to be the fastest growing segment, and with the way projections look it could move from a fraction to a majority of tech industry energy consumption rather soon. That's why I care specifically about it.

I'm not affiliated with, or well-versed in, any other industries, so I'll leave those to people who know better about it.

For things to improve, we can't wait until we can fix *everything*. It must be sufficient to start with *something*.

Show threadDaniel

@jwarlander @awinkler I believe what Alexander is asking:

Why not have a carbon tax on a higher level and don't get into details about what we do with it.

If in the end AI/LLM gets powered by renewables, fine. If it gets powered by non-renewable but they pay the price, fine too. Because it's a carbon tax it's not even specific to AI/LLMs.

Now it could be a carbon tax or any other reasonable regulation but it seems like capitalism can't figure out a solution for climate change on its own.

Oct 19, 2024 at 1:39amWeb
Show threadAlexander WinklerOct 19, 2024
@djh @jwarlander you're right.Of course, an effective carbon tax won't happen. It's just strange that ai is expected to meet standards we don't actually apply elsewhere. The dabate seems skewed and I don't understand why exactly.