[j-pb]

people downvote your sarcasm, but if you do the calculations you're kinda right.

1Kg of Beef costs:

  - The energy equivalent of 60.000 ChatGPT queries.
  - The water equivalent of 50.000.000 ChatGPT queries.

Applied to their metric Mistral Large 2 used:

  - The water equivalent of 18.8 Tons of Beef.
  - The CO2 equivalent of 204 Tons of Beef.

France produces 3836 Tons of Beef per day,

and one large LLM per 6 months.

So yeah, maybe use ChatGPT to ask for vegan recipes.

People will try to blame everything else they can get a hold on before changing the stuff that really has an impact, if it means touching their lifestyle.

The LLMs are not the problem here.

[plants]

Those are incredible stats. As a vegan who uses LLMs at work frequently, I would love to have the source as well :)

[j-pb]

  - https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environmental-standard-for-ai
  - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201677/greenhouse-gas-emissions-of-major-food-products/
  - https://www.statista.com/chart/9483/how-thirsty-is-our-food/
  - https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
  - https://x.com/sama/status/1890820962993533232

You got to do the calculations yourself though.

[plants]

Wow, thanks. I’m even coming up with 500K chatGPT queries for the amount of energy consumed as a KG of beef, though I might have moved a decimal place somewhere - feel free to check my math :)

“average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours of energy” - or 0.00034MWH

Using this calculator: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... - in my zip, 0.0002KG of CO2 per MWH. (Though, I suppose it depends more on the zip where they’re doing inference, however this translation didn’t seem to vary much when I tried other zips)

Then, 99.48KG/0.0002KG= 497,400 chatGPT queries worth of CO2 per KG of beef?

Thanks for sharing!

[j-pb]

`0.00034MWH`should probably be kilo not mega, but I think you still did it correctly :D

I think I used Btu (thermal units) in my calculation, so I only calculated actual energy expenditure for my 60.000 queries result.

But you are right, a better metric might be to use CO2-equivalent, because cows emit a lot of methane, whereas chatbots don't.

99.48KG / 0.228kg/kq = 436,315 queries per kg of beef.

Yup checks out!

[JimDabell]

This is a good article on the subject:

> Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

— https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...

He’s done some good followup articles as well:

https://andymasley.substack.com/s/ai-and-the-environment

[bluefirebrand]

The difference is that food is important and live-giving and LLMs are a very fancy magic 8-ball

[j-pb]

You don't need beef, beef is a lifestyle choice.

I use LLMs to do all of my coding these days, it's certainly more essential for feeding me than beef.

[leksak]

Also a lifestyle choice

[j-pb]

Yes but one with a much much much smaller impact as we just demonstrated.

This is exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance in people that I meant.

You literally see the math and go "but I like my meat, why should I give that up if you got your AI".

Because, as I just demonstrated, my AI takes a infinitesimal fraction of your meat.

It literally takes you only going vegan for a day to offset your entire AI usage of a year.

[jrflowers]

This is spot on because there can’t be two issues that exist simultaneously. There can only be one thing that wastes enormous amounts of energy and that thing is beef

[j-pb]

You can try to misconstrue and ridicule the argument, but that won't change the math that if you have one thing that causes 1 unit of damage, and another thing that causes 100.000 units of damage, then for all intents and purposes the thing that produces 1 unit of damage is irrelevant.

And any discussion that tries to frame them as somewhat equally important issues is dishonest and either malicious or delusional.

My guess, as I've expressed earlier in the comment chain, is that it's emotionally easier for people to bike-shed about the 0.01% of their environmental impact, than to actually tackle things that make up 20%.

And no it's not only beef (which is a stand-in for meat and diary), another low hanging fruit is also transport, like switching your car for a bike.

But switching from meat and diary to a vegan diet would reduce up to 20% of your personal environmental impact, in terms of CO2.

And about 80-90% of rainforest deforestation is driven directly or indirectly by livestock production.

So it's simply the easiest most impactful thing everyone can do. (Switching your car for a bike isn't possible for people in rural areas for example.)

[mlnj]

Nothing stopping us to live the hermit life in the mountains. But here we are trying to get bits and bytes to write that JIRA ticket instead of us.

[motoxpro]

You could eat a few bites less of beef in one meal and that would be your equivalent AI use for a lifetime.

[tptacek]

Where does a Youtube LetsPlay video fall into that calculation? My understanding is that a single watch of a video is orders of magnitude more than a day's active use of ChatGPT.