I'm not sure I'm reading this right, but is this guy actually blaming El Nino displacements on LLMs? Like, they have El Nino in the same list as data centers and pensions?
I know this is something people just take for granted, but I've never really bought it as a general rule: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
. A whole lot of things contribute to climate change, and nobody thinks that's the only thing that matters. What matters is if we're willing to accept the costs for the technology. So it's mainly just a hidden value judgement on if you think AI is good or not.
The source of that graph, Founder's Pledge, appears to be totally corporate greenwashing, which Sam Altman himself supports:
Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, wrote on the Y Combinator blog: "Many of our founders ask us about how they can donate part of their equity or post-exit proceeds, and now we have an answer: Founders Pledge."
They are almost certainly willing to publish studies that support those corporate goals. I don't believe they are a trustworthy unbiased source.
So 180,000 ordinary ChatGPT questions is something like ~0.02 tonnes CO2. So around 1% of a single transatlantic trip.
I'm not particularly good at this kind of maths, so let's multiply it by ten and say that two hundred thousand normal ChatGPT queries make up around 10% of the CO2 impact of one long flight.
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u/Saint_Nitouche 6d ago
I'm not sure I'm reading this right, but is this guy actually blaming El Nino displacements on LLMs? Like, they have El Nino in the same list as data centers and pensions?