[marcyb5st]

Super happy to see something like this getting traction. As someone that is trying to reduce my carbon footprint sometimes I feel bad about asking any model to do something trivial. With something like that perhaps the guilt will lessen

[whall6]

If you live in the U.S., marginal electricity demand during the day is almost invariably met with solar or wind (solar typically runs at a huge surplus on sunny days). Go forth and AI in peace, marcyb5st.

[marcyb5st]

Thanks! That helps somewhat. However, it feels like that's just part of the story.

If I remember correctly hyperscalers put their green agendas in stasis now that LLMs are around and that makes me believe that there is a CO2 cost associated.

Still, any improvement is a good news and if diffusion models replace autoregressive models we can invest that surplus in energy in something else useful for the environment.

[kuhewa]

This made me wonder - do any cloud compute systems have an option to time jobs or use physical resources geographically based on surplus power availability to minimise emissions?

I reckon it might incidentally happen if optimising for cost of power depending how correlated that is to carbon intensivity of power generation, which admittedly I haven't thought through.

[mmoskal]

To put this into perspective, driving for an hour in an electric car (15kW avg consumption) consumes about as much energy as 50,000 chatgpt queries [0] Running your laptop for an hour would be around 100 queries.

[0] https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...

[ris]

Please see yesterday's https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/29/chatgpt-is-not-bad-for... instead of propagating the hand-wringing.