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?
@simon If you are looking at an overall CO2e budget for the way you live, then in principle you could look at where to allocate that 'spend' of CO2e
In economy a flight is approx 0.13kg CO2e per km flown. Double that for Premium economy and triple it for business class. LHR JFK return in economy is 1.6T CO2e per person.
There's estimates on tinterweb that suggest GPT CO2e at about 24tCO2e per day. Training cost est at 522tCO2e
TL;DR travel is always the big CO2e emission for most of us
@LorenAmelang @simon yep, the area for the seat plus the person plus the luggage allowance plus the other bits and bobs. A lay flat biz class seat is 2-3x the space of an econ seat or threabouts.
Actual Co2e varies by plane make and the route flown.
Having done the CO2e calcs for my tech dept, the shock was to see that bluntly, most of our carbon footprint was in the commute to and from work. Overwhelmingly so.
Simon Willison
drs1969 (David Smith) 🇬🇧
LorenAmelang