> "Leaving aside [all of AI's potential benefits] it is clear that large-language A.I. engines are creating real harms to all of humanity right now [...] While a human being is responsible for five tons of CO2 per year, training a large neural LM [language model] costs 284 tons."

Presuming this figure is in the right ballpark – 284 tons is actually quite a lot.

I did some back of the napkin math (with the help of GPT, of course.) 284 tons is roughly equivalent to...

- a person taking 120 round trip flights from Los Angeles to London - 2 or 3 NBA teams traveling to all their away games over the course of a season - driving 1 million miles in a car - 42 years of energy usage by a typical U.S. household