Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret - eviltoast
First-of-its-kind US bill would address the environmental costs of the technology, but there’s a long way to go.

one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.

  • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
    31·
    9 months ago

    I mean an argument could be made here, right? Just thinking theoretically.

    Maxim: we want to be as eco-friendly as possible.

    Per a given task, understand the least environmentally-taxing way to accomplish the goal.

    Task requires one, two, or three/four DuckDuckGo searches? DDG away.

    Task requires five DDG searches, OR one LLM query? Language model it is.

    (LLM may well rarely be the answer there, of course, just laying out the theory!)