The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.
That's true, and I am not anti-AI. I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens.
Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative.
But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable.
By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wanted to offer a broader critique and create an analogy, not just talk about energy usage on its own.
What I had in mind was: it's easier to go many places that are a mile or less from me, by car. Because everything is obstructed by cars. And I'm atrophied by lack of movement.
Best would be to drive somewhere to move/walk.
People already do that in masses.
And doing shopping by car, because everything else seems unbearable, also takes away your time, apart from wasting energy compared to more, smaller shops that would be reachable by foot, bycicle etc.
I guess you know the argument.
Today, people's thinking atrophies because their LLM is probably right in their summarization of some Wikipedia article, plus 2-3 other random sources.
Or so.
Using the Wikipedia search function is not expensive.
But, I mostly had a bigger picture in mind than what is the cost of inference.
I think it's a good analogy in many ways, and personally I think car-centric society has a lot of flaws. I think the ease that AI brings to tasks may erode mental capabilities in the same way cars have eroded our collective physical health.* That said, it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues.
I am concerned about the environmental impacts that AI poses, but they don't seem to me to be so catastrophic. Solar and battery tech has made enormous leaps in the past couple decades, and we will need to pivot to clean energy future irrespective of AI.
*This said, I have become gradually more alarmed over the past decade at the lack of epistemological rigor in the general public, as made apparent through the rise of social media. I don't know that AI becoming a truth-seeking crutch for people wouldn't be more good than bad.
> it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues
Oh my god, no. I also want the benefits of automobiles! They are strictly more capable than, say, trains. That's where I would derail the discussion completely when going into details, but no, I am not against cars as a technology.
Apart from all the ethical and social arguments (logistics, ambulances, the elderly, etc etc). But that's not where I wanted to go.
I was making a leap here simply because of the whole complex around prisoner's, dilemma, the commons, state economy, and so forth.
Since at least ~100yrs ago, I guess cars and streets as the primary mode of transportation have also "won the vote" / are what the majority wants, so it's also an interesting analogy for diminishing returns maybe.
Building out more car infrastructure is certainly not controversial where there is absolutely none but there are commercial or residential buildings.
Anyway, lots of associations are worth considering here IMO. The ultimate limiting capacity here, when disregarding all environmental or health concerns, is simply space and the positive externalities (cities etc) around existing infrastructure.
The problem with grandiose statements like the GGP's are that they compare a realized outcome with an entirely idealized outcome they have in their brains as an alternative.
> I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens.
Hand wringing about AI datacenter's environmental impact is well and good. We should keep the data centers accountable for their consumption and waste.
I just wish the same people had been upset the last 20 years with poor water resource management in a lot of areas (the west US especially) with urban, ranching and farming development.
The past may be past, but it's important that even now we point out the relative scale of resource usage, pollution, etc going forward of everything from cars to AI to golf courses to beef.
It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel...
80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world?
One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?
No, they're saying that 80% of genai queries (aka anything sent to an LLM; I won't speak on the validity of the percentage) are not things someone would search on Google. It's things like trial-and-error vibecoding, openclaw-like agentic loops, talking to chatgpt like it's a person, etc. In other words, most genai queries are not for getting "obscure information" or even getting direct information at all. It's about either getting it to do something you don't want to do yourself, or using it as a replacement for someone else (junior dev, therapist, friend, significant other, etc).
That's just what some people generally use to refer to LLM input string/prompt/message/etc. The only thing the LLM can do is return information...in the form of text, so every request is one for information.
If we want to get really pedantic, every generated token is the answer to the query: what's the next most probable token in this sequence of tokens?
If "query" doesn't imply intent by the user, it ceases to be a useful word. You can acrobat your way to imagine a digital system has agency to ask a question before it receives bits, but then any transfer of data could be called a query.
When I post this http request containing this reply, you could say my machine is querying the server to ask "what did you do with the message I just gave you", but then query stops having any useful semantic value to distinguish it from "request"
Regardless, this is tangential. I don't disagree that a lot of LLM use is not in pursuit of knowledge, but enough of it is for me to think that preferring LLMs not to exist is a hard position to defend, at least without making the case for existential doom.
I do plenty of AI queries, both pragmatic ones and some for entertainment: witnessing talktotransformer was mind-bending already at the time! And since then, I've tried frontier models, local, coding agents, and use plenty of them on the regular.
I awe at the capabilites of generative AI.
I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car.
I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.
Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative.
But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable.
By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wanted to offer a broader critique and create an analogy, not just talk about energy usage on its own.
What I had in mind was: it's easier to go many places that are a mile or less from me, by car. Because everything is obstructed by cars. And I'm atrophied by lack of movement. Best would be to drive somewhere to move/walk.
People already do that in masses.
And doing shopping by car, because everything else seems unbearable, also takes away your time, apart from wasting energy compared to more, smaller shops that would be reachable by foot, bycicle etc.
I guess you know the argument.
Today, people's thinking atrophies because their LLM is probably right in their summarization of some Wikipedia article, plus 2-3 other random sources.
Or so.
Using the Wikipedia search function is not expensive.
But, I mostly had a bigger picture in mind than what is the cost of inference.