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 threadGraham Knapp
@simon your writing often encourages others to use LLMs more. Would you like to take personal responsibility for your influence on other people's emissions? Have I framed the question fairly?
Oct 19, 2024 at 5:57pmWeb
Show threadSimon WillisonOct 19, 2024

@graham_knapp I do think about that - am I having an outsized negative effect by showing people how to use this stuff?

I figure people are going to use this stuff anyway, so I hope to have a positive impact by encouraging people to use it responsibly and productively (and not just to generate slop)

Show threadGraham KnappOct 19, 2024
@simon I definitely think you have a positive effect on me, and that does result in more LLM usage, at least over the last few weeks. I suspect the overall effect of LLMs is similar to adding new lanes of traffic - letting everyone move faster, write more software and generate more emissions. I guess that for most of us, choosing to buy a newer Mac / GPU is the most environmentally damaging way we could respond to this. The individual impact of using cloud LLMs looks smaller than ✈️🚗🍔...