Mastodawn

Simon Willison Oct 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?

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Alaric Snell-Pym Oct 18, 2024

@simon wait what, you have air trips every year? Let alone MULTIPLE air trips? Ok, sure, financially supporting LLM training and using cloud LLMs is probably not a significant addition to *your* resource consumption... 😕

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Daniel Oct 19, 2024

@kitten_tech Before you shame air travel specifically I'd check out emissions from car trips.

It's surprising that emissions from cars are not that many orders of magnitudes away from air travel.

Do the calculations for all car trips per year and see how it compares to a flight. The answer might be shocking to you. It was to me.

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Alaric Snell-Pym

@djh yeah, cars are dreadful and lots of little trips soon add up! Not to mention the impact of constructing all the roads and car parks and the cars themselves - so EVs are a positive step but only a small step... We really need more urban public transport, but we also need to build towns and cities around that, and THAT takes a long time to change...