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
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.)
>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
You make a good point. A problem is only a real problem if you can’t find a bigger thing that makes it look small by comparison. For example, the worldwide concrete industry creates more co2 than beef does so there is no reason to stop eating beef if you enjoy it.
Now I know that some might say that “all of this is cumulative” or “the material problems that stem from entrenched industries is actually a reason not to invent completely novel wasteful things rather than a justification for them” but in reality only two things are true: only the biggest problem is real, and the only problem is definitely some other guy’s doing. If I waste x energy and my neighbor wastes y amount, a goal of reducing (x+y) is oppressive whereas a goal where I just need to try to keep x lower than y feels a lot nicer.
I agree. Humans have been eating meat and doing construction for the entire history of civilization, they are not the sort of things that could be affected by posting online. LLMs on the other hand are new, largely in the hands of a small handful of companies, and a couple of those companies are bleeding cash in such a way that they might actually respond to consumer pressure. It is cynical to compare them to things that we know will not change as a justification for a blanket excuse for them.
Seeing as these models being wasteful is integral to the revenue of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, the more people that tell them that the right business strategy is to start perpetually building data centers and power plants, the less incentive they have to build models that run efficiently on consumer hardware.
They just suggested a different bike shed — one for the purpose of their argument won’t ever get fixed. J-pb’s point is that running a bunch of generators 24/7 in Memphis is fine because people eat meat. Inefficient LLMs in the real world are okay because people could theoretically become vegan but have not. It’s just a thought experiment
> Whatever you need to tell yourself to keep eating meat buddy.
I’m not the one that brought up moralizing or food. I can’t really comment on your relationship with your diet but it kind of seems like you saw somebody mention power usage and unprompted shared “well I don’t eat meat or cheese or yogurt” so I guess keep that up while you use enough energy to power your home to write some code slower than you would without it?
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.