[zitterbewegung]

They are using it as an example but, if you take all of the training across all organizations it represents a huge carbon footprint due to training. Also, inference isn't exactly free either . Open sourcing your weights and putting them downloadable would get rid of that but on the other hand you have trade secrets that would make you not want to release your weights so inevitable another group will reproduce your weights and use more electricity.

[simonw]

I wonder how the carbon footprint of training every single large language model that exists today compares to the carbon footprint of a single day of global air traffic.

[zitterbewegung]

That question is unanswerable so its weird to wonder about it...

[simonw]

Is it? I wonder about unanswerable questions all the time.

[pxc]

What's answerable isn't even clear in advance most of the time, for many scientific, philosophical, and mathematical questions! Questions that are not obviously answerable often turn out to be really productive, important, or interesting, too.

[taneq]

I bet it's a smaller carbon footprint than dogecoin.