[astrange]

It doesn't have to exclusively be one or the other.

> If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.

I think this is covered by the part in Yegge's post where he says not to run it unless you're so rich you don't care if it works or not.

[chrisjj]

How rich do you have to be not care about the environmental cost?

[nl]

I think Andrew Ng wrote a great piece on this.

For example, in the US, which do you think uses more water: Golf Courses or Data Centers?

  a) Gold Courses use twice as much water as Data Centers
  b) About the same
  c) Data Centers use twice as much water as Gold Courses

The answer is "None of the above": "Golf courses in the U.S. use around 500 billion gallons annually of water to irrigate their turf [snip] data centers consume [snip] 17 billion gallons, or maybe around 10x that if we include water use from energy generation"

Do you think a Google search or a Gemini query produces more carbon?

> Google had estimated that a single web search query produces 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. [snip] the median Gemini LLM app query produces a surprisingly low 0.03 grams of CO2 emissions), and uses less energy than watching 9 seconds of television

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-336/

[4bpp]

Environmentalism has always been a "weight of our sins" sort of issue. Plastic straws are a rounding error relative to all the capricious uses of plastic and fossil fuels in our economy, but few things feel as frivolous as using once and then throwing away a piece of plastic for personal convenience while engaging in an already-kinda-sinful feeling activity like indulging in a soft drink, while simultaneously the paper straw that turns to cardboard mash in your mouth is perfectly calibrated to make you feel like you are doing real penance without encumbering anything economically important.

So plastic straw bans (instead of plastic slipper bans, plastic food packaging bans, taxes on plastic clothes fibres...) are what we get. And because the structure of the cause/problem is the same, the language of environmentalism naturally attaches itself and gives form to the vague sense of moral unease surrounding AI. Governments are surely already building tomorrow's tightly integrated thought police drone swarm complexes, but a crusade against those who simulate a zoo of programming weasels in our midst is much easier and morally no less fulfilling.

[Otterly99]

Thank you for pointing that out. It irritates me every time I see the "water waste" argument. A toilet tank contains 5-13L of water, so if everybody started flushing only half the time they piss, that's an average of 4.5L of water saved per usage! That's roughly 900 LLM queries (using the 5 gram of water figure). Yet, I don't see anybody urging other to flush less, even thought it would have a much bigger impact. And if you ask, yes, I only flush once in a while, so I earned my tokens.

[chrisjj]

> It irritates me every time I see the "water waste" argument

You didn't see it here, note.

[chrisjj]

... computation produces dramatically less carbon than alternatives. Google had estimated that a single web search query produces 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. In contrast, driving from my home to the local library to look up a fact would generate about 400 grams

So, how much less carbon is produced by a Gas Town run than the equivalent number of drives to the library?

/i

[nl]

It's called Gas Town for a reason...

[astrange]

That's an Internet meme and not a real issue.

[Retr0id]

It might be an internet meme when you're talking about the odd chatgpt free tier query, but burning through tokens at the rate of gas town can probably saturate a rack worth of GPU.