[schwartzworld]

Well, you could always focus on the ridiculous environmental impact of llms. I read once that asking ChatGPT used 250x as much energy as just googling. But now google incorporated llms into search so…

I grew up on the banks of the Hudson River, polluted by corporations dumping their refuse into it while reaping profits. Anthropic/openai/etc are doing the same thing.

[bix6]

The water usage is insane too.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes. It's horrible. Probably 250x as much as watering your lawn per 1M ChatGPT queries. Except your sprinklers' vendor probably incorporates ChatGPT in their marketing, so they're literally using water to sell you tools to use water!

Oh the humanity!

I can't take those eco-impact threads seriously. Yes, ChatGPT uses compute, compute uses water and electricity. So does keeping your lawn trimmed and your dog well, and of the three, I bet ChatGPT is actually generating most value to everyone on the net.

Everything we do uses electricity and water. Everything that lives uses energy and water. The question isn't whether, or how much, but what for. Yes, LLMs use a lot of energy in absolute terms - but that's because they're that useful. Yes, despite what people who deny basic reality would tell you, LLMs actually are tremendously useful. In relative terms, they don't use that much more energy or water vs. things they displace, and they make up for it in the improvements.

Want to talk environmental impact of ChatGPT et al.? Sure, but let's frame it with comparative figures for sportsball, concerts, holiday decorations, Christmas lights, political campaigns, or pets. Suddenly, it turns out the whole thing is merely a storm in a teacup.

[bix6]

Have you read about the impact of data centers in non-US countries? Building a data center that requires potable water in a drought stricken country that lacks the resources to defend itself is incredibly destructive.

And I don’t have a dog but that water usage certainly provides the most benefit. Man’s best friend > online sex bot.

[TeMPOraL]

> Have you read about the impact of data centers in non-US countries? Building a data center that requires potable water in a drought stricken country that lacks the resources to defend itself is incredibly destructive.

And? Have you read about the impact of ${production facilities} in non-US countries? That's literally what industrialization and globalization are about. Data centers aren't unique here - same is true about power plants, factories, industrial zones, etc. It all boils down to the fact that money, electricity and compute are fungible.

Note: this alone is not a defense of LLMs, merely me arguing that they're nothing special and don't deserve being singled out - it's just another convoluted scenario of multinational industries vs. local population.

(Also last time I checked, the whole controversy was being stoked up by a bunch of large interest groups that aren't happy about competition disturbing their subsidized water costs - it's not actually a grassroots thing, but an industry-level PR war.)

> Man’s best friend > online sex bot.

That's disingenous. I could just as well say: {education, empowering individuals to solve more of their own problems, improving patient outcomes} > pets and trimmed lawns. LLMs do all of these and sex bots too; I'm pretty sure they do more of the former than the latter, but you can't prove it either way, because compute is fungible and accurate metrics are hard to come by :P.