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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

"25,000 average-sized households per day"

For 20 million users? Great, you just proved that AI energy impact is not big. Like a fraction of 20 million users over-using AC like it happens, for instance, in the US. Or flying for work continuously without a good reason, also super common, and incredibly more wasteful (~30h flight time of a 737 is like the energy needed for a training, not inference, of a model with 100s of billions parameters).

The point about AI and energy does not make sense, it exists only because there are people that are worried about AI, and need to find something to show it creates damage.

You can install Flux in your fucking laptop and generate images there, and you'll see that to make it as hot (or discharge as quickly) as when you play any modern videogame, it takes a lot of efforts and generated images. And you are running on a battery...

Want to talk about all these stupid Javascript frameworks, that make loading a trivial page so wasteful, energy-wise? Almost everything is worse than AI, basically. The fact that this post is upvoted here on HN, where once there was more critical thinking, is testament on how bad nowadays we are doing.

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To add some extra numbers here just to showcase how little energy usage this is.

This means it's adding about 0.012% additional energy consumption to those users energy consumption.

From another angle: Average US house energy consumption is around 30kWh per day. 0.012% of that is 3.75 watt hours of energy per day. This is the equivalent amount of energy as streaming HD video to your iPhone on a 4G network for 1.5 seconds. [0]

So in other words, a 15s youtube ad you are forced to watch on your phone before watching the video you were going to watch anyway takes an order of magnitude more energy than the average AI user according to this article.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109623/electricity-cons...

Help me understand. The article claims 20MM users with an average of 24 prompts per day. Do we have any information on the average number of prompts per user? I suspect it would follow a Pareto distribution, with a small subset consuming much much more, but no clue as to where that average assumption holds.

Edit: a quick search points to 5-10 prompts per session but we’d still need to know the average number of sessions

In December I did 61 images, and in November I did 121, according to Replicate's billing. Probably more like 10-20 images per session, which for me are usually 1-2 times per week?

Yes, I searched this too. There probably are many single round sessions, but the average length is 8-12 messages.

Is it not still better to just avoid using all this energy though? Do we really need to have these LLM tools everywhere?

And more importantly, when do we stop justifying the use of one finite resource by pointing to all the other ways we could reduce use but don't? Just because people waste a bunch of energy, water, wood, etc doesn't justify using it however you want, at least in my opinion.

We don't "need" it any more than we need endless streams of cat videos and fake personalities on tiktok. Some people get more utility out of one over the other.

Some would argue that we would all be better off without those other things and keeping AI instead.

That subjective interpretation of marginal utility and where valuable becomes wasteful for any particular action is both the reason and the answer for your questions.

To me this line of questioning is perplexing, because the history of civilization and technological development is essentially a story of applying more energyin place of human work. We burned wood to cook food and unlock more calories from it. We replaced wagons and horses with cars, trucks and gasoline. We harnessed the sun and the atom and sent probes throughout our solar system to do research.

We have always required more energy to advance civilization. Sure we should improve efficiency and sustainability, if we don't we may cause a calamity which could take out many of us as well as lot of other critters (though on a geological scale, it'll basically be meaningless). But if we start thinking that using more energy is inherently a bad thing that needs to oppose, civilization will regress.

The underlying problem, as I see it, that underlies these questions is whether we will ever learn what "enough" really means for ourselves.

At some point people have to decide for themselves when they have enough and when they can just enjoy life as much as possible rather than chasing the next thing.

I'm not proposing that its a clear line, or that the line is the same for everyone, or that the line should be decided by someone else and forced on you.

My point is simply that we're screwed as a species if we continue to just want more and more of everything, especially convenience, regardless of the cost.

May come down to philosophical differences - but I'd prefer humanity to continue progressing, curing diseases, learning about the Universe, improving quality of life, etc. as far as we can, as opposed to deciding at some point (or gradually) that we've had enough. Threshold for new advancements should not be whether we absolutely need it, but whether it does more good than harm - which I think is easily the case for LLMs and other machine learning models.

> continue progressing

Honest question here, hopefully it comes across that way but you never know with text.

I've never quite understood "progress" as a goal. The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards and I often feel like its used more to mean "just keep changing stuff."

How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there?

For me that's the challenge. I think I said it elsewhere in this thread, but people rarely know what "enough" means for them. To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff and consuming all along the way because we've zoomed in on the approach of always wanting things to be better rather than setting an expectation of what is good enough.

> The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards [...] How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there?

I'd claim you can in theory have a direction without an end-point - where even if some measure is at 9^99 there's always still 9^99 + 1.

At the very least, you can definitely have a direction without setting an artificial end-point. May be that in reducing malaria cases/infant mortality rates we hit 0 and thus literally cannot go lower, and so hit a goalpost in that sense, but if we're at 500 malaria cases and can reduce it further (without equal/greater degradations in other areas) then I don't see why we should ever be "happy to stop there".

> To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff

Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend.

> Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend.

Sure, and I'm not trying to say we haven't made significant impacts with technological advancements. We do still gave to define how we'd even measure humanity's position though, without that we don't have direction and can't know if we're getting closure or further away.

Trends require a similar context. On a 30 year scale I'd say we may have moved upwards (though significantly is a stretch). On 100 years we have almost certainly made significamt movement upwards on some metrics but others would have a significant trend downward. On a 1,000 year scale I think it'd be harder to find areas where we haven't trended upward significantly (I'm sure there are some, but I'd be surprised if there are many). That still leaves the question though, do we always need to trend upward on a never ending treadmill of change and increased consumption?

> We do still gave to define how we'd even measure humanity's position though, without that we don't have direction and can't know if we're getting closure or further away.

What people fundamentally value will vary by their philosophy (increasing pleasure and decreasing suffering, searching for higher meaning in the Universe, etc.) but I'd claim the intermediary objectives tend to have a lot of overlap, with a shared set coalescing around (roughly) increasing humanity's knowledge and potential/capacity to act. For instance, gaining capability to deflect meteors puts us in a better position because getting wiped out by one would render accomplishing effectively anything else impossible - making it an intermediary objective common to pretty much all frameworks.

> On a 30 year scale I'd say we may have moved upwards (though significantly is a stretch)

As compared to 1995, the average life expectancy has increased from to 64.9 to 73.5 and the portion of population living in extrmee poverty has decreased from 32.5% to 8.5% - seems significant to me, even ignoring scientific/technological advancements beyond that. True that averaging over a longer time period smooths out the bumps.

> do we always need to trend upward on a never ending treadmill

To me, "treadmill" implies lack of progress. If we have the option to improve things (e.g: reduce cancer cases) and an option to not, I don't really understand the idea that we should default to the latter, only choosing the former if we "need" to. Only way I can really make sense of that policy is if at some level you actually think it's instead a downwards/net negative trend.

> For instance, gaining capability to deflect meteors puts us in a better position

That would still have to be weighed with the cost of such an ability. What would it take to actually do that? What would it take to get there? And what destructive or dangerous uses are now unlocked along that path? In a vacuum I'd absolutely want to have that ability, in reality its just a lot harder to say whether that goal is worth chasing.

> As compared to 1995, the average life expectancy has increased from to 64.9 to 73.5 and the portion of population living in extrmee poverty has decreased from 32.5% to 8.5%

What's the scope for those stats, are they global of specific to one country?

I'm always torn on life expectancy as a metric. Modern medicine has done a great job of extending lives but I've seen plenty of examples of the extra years being pretty miserable. I'd be very interested to see a life expectancy comparison taking into account quality if life.

> To me, "treadmill" implies lack of progress.

Totally fair, that may not be the best analogy. My point was just that its a goal with no end state.

> If we have the option to improve things (e.g: reduce cancer cases) and an option to not, I don't really understand the idea that we should default to the latter

The point with defaulting to the latter is "don't break a god thing." Considering only the potential upsides misses the potential downsides. We can't cure cancer in a vacuum, there are always costs, and frankly the idea of curing a disease seems more utopian than realistic. Disease is nothing more than a named collection of symptoms, you may be able to drastically reduce any one root cause but that doesn't eradicate the symptoms and most modern treatments are designed only to treat symptoms and ignore root cause.

> That would still have to be weighed with [...]

As always you'd have to determine whether some course of action would have disproportionate negative impact on other objectives, yep. Point there was to set out on what basis I'd decide and weigh those objectives - an orientation for what "progress" is.

> And what destructive or dangerous uses are now unlocked along that path?

I believe unanticipated novel applications skew positive on average, largely on account of most humans having mostly-positive intentions.

> What's the scope for those stats, are they global of specific to one country?

Global, e.g:

* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy

* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...

> but I've seen plenty of examples of the extra years being pretty miserable. I'd be very interested to see a life expectancy comparison taking into account quality if life.

You could consider a factor such as Quality-Adjusted Life Expectancy (QALE), which is also on the rise.

> The point with defaulting to the latter is "don't break a god thing."

If "break" means "make overall better", why not?

> Considering only the potential upsides misses the potential downsides.

To be clear, my stance is that you should consider whether it's a net positive/negative:

* "Threshold for new advancements should not be whether we absolutely need it, but whether it does more good than harm"

* "if we're at 500 malaria cases and can reduce it further (without equal/greater degradations in other areas) then I don't see why we should ever be "happy to stop there""

My understanding is that you believe there should be some point at which we just stop even if there are still more beneficial changes to be made (in addition to not making net-negative changes, which we both agree on - though perhaps disagree about what specifically works out to be net-negative).

> We can't cure cancer in a vacuum, there are always costs,

There are costs, but it's very easily possible for the benefits to outweigh them, and more becomes feasible as humanity's knowledge/capabilities increase.

> and frankly the idea of curing a disease seems more utopian than realistic.

There are already a couple of diseases (including smallpox) that we've completely eradicated, and more (like polio) that we've made very good progress on. Cancer is tougher by its nature, but we can certainly at least reduce the number of cases and improve life for those who have it.

> If "break" means "make overall better", why not?

Well that depends heavily on how well we can predict the outcomes and account for downsides and externalized costs. That doesn't mean never change anything, I'd never argue for that, but I am generally more hesitant to than most to change things that are working well enough.

> My understanding is that you believe there should be some point at which we just stop even if there are still more beneficial changes to be made

I think your description here assumes too much clarity in what is possible or what will happen if you continue on. Sometimes the system is well understood and the potential gains are pretty clear, that isn't always the case though.

> There are already a couple of diseases (including smallpox) that we've completely eradicated, and more (like polio) that we've made very good progress on

I wish virology was that cut and dry. There are diseases that present nearly identically to smallpox and polio but were given different names based on hypothesized causes. Monkeypox and acute flaccid myelitis come to mind, respectively. If I remember right, polio is actually one where the clinical diagnosis steps rules it out simply because polio has been deemed irradiated, meaning anyone with polio-like symptoms must have something else because we got rid of polio.

There's a whole rabbit hole around how virology tests and isolates viruses, that's probably not helpful to ho down here. My point stands though, maybe we can eradicate a particular virus but we can't really eradicate a disease when that's largely just a named collection of symptoms.

> I think your description here assumes too much clarity in what is possible or what will happen if you continue on. Sometimes the system is well understood and the potential gains are pretty clear, that isn't always the case though.

Does halting not also come with lack of clarity? For instance, say we're choosing between two options:

1. Continue with disease/vaccine/antibiotic/etc. research

2. Halt said research

To me it seems as though both options come with uncertainties, which could resolve positively as well as negatively. That there is uncertainty or a lack of clarity does not bias me towards option 2. My choice would still be based on analysis of which option has the better expected outcome (which is, to my current knowledge, the former) - even if the best analysis available is a guesstimate with very low correlation (so long as it's a positive correlation).

> There are diseases that present nearly identically to smallpox and polio but were given different names based on hypothesized causes. Monkeypox and acute flaccid myelitis come to mind

Mpox is considerably milder - having killed hundreds of people compared to smallpox's hundreds of millions.

> If I remember right, polio is actually one where the clinical diagnosis steps rules it out simply because polio has been deemed irradiated

Polio isn't eradicated like smallpox is, though for most people it may as well be. Given ongoing eradication efforts my understanding is that there is fairly extensive testing compared to other diseases of its rarity (e.g: https://polioeradication.org/what-we-do/), so it's not just a case of "it's gone because we're ignoring it" if that's what's being implied.

> Does halting not also come with lack of clarity?

That depends on how you choose to view it. Choosing to halt, or to be happy with where you are, is a certainty in that you have what you have but it is uncertain in that you don't know what you could have had if you kept going.

> Mpox is considerably milder - having killed hundreds of people compared to smallpox's hundreds of millions.

The severity is milder for sure, but the list of symptoms is nearly identical. Severity is a tricky one for most pathogens, its very common for severity to decrease over time as a novel pathogen becomes endemic.

> so it's not just a case of "it's gone because we're ignoring it" if that's what's being implied

My implication was "we won't diagnose it because we know it was eradicated," but that may come down to semantics. I'm happy to be wrong there too, I can't find the source I remember seeing for clinical diagnosis so maybe I'm thinking of a different condition.

> is a certainty in that you have what you have

If you halt disease research, there's a greater chance of a pandemic - or losing the battle to drug-resistant diseases. If you halt meteor deflection programs, there's a greater chance of a significant portion of life being wiped out by a meteor. That doesn't seem like certainty in any sense to me.

> The severity is milder for sure, but the list of symptoms is nearly identical.

You could say that we haven't eliminated all diseases with similar clinical presentations, but we have eliminated smallpox - the disease that was killing hundreds of millions.

> Severity is a tricky one for most pathogens, its very common for severity to decrease over time as a novel pathogen becomes endemic.

Mpox is not just a strain of smallpox that became less virulent over time - they diverged long before smallpox jumped to humans. Smallpox stayed deadly for thousands of years.

> If you halt disease research, there's a greater chance of a pandemic

To clarify, there is greater chance of natural pandemic. The chance of man made pandemic goes down or disappears entirely though. I don't know how to properly weigh the pros and cons there, especially without know likely top secret details of what biological weapons research is ongoing.

> but we have eliminated smallpox

We have a definitional disagreement here. My understanding is that diseases are classified and diagnosed by symptom, not by severity of the symptoms. That would be especially tricky as everyone will have a different reaction to the pathogen or condition and the same underlying cause could present with more or less severity.

If you consider smallpox eliminated because disease with a similar severity is no longer present then we likely have to consider Covid eliminated as well, I don't think many would agree that it is though. People still test positive for CoV-2 and are diagnosed with Covid based on symptoms, it just isn't nearly as deadly or severe for most of the population now.

> Mpox is not just a strain of smallpox that became less virulent over time

Maybe I'm being pedantic here, apologies if that it. My understanding, though, is that monkeypox and smallpox are/were diagnosed by symptom and rarely or never diagnosed by isolating and identifying the virus in patients. Monkeypox and smallpox have very similar symptoms, meaning they could very well be considered the same disease even if they are believed to be caused by two different viruses.

> To clarify, there is greater chance of natural pandemic.

I think it'd be excessively pessimistic (and very selectively so) to believe vaccine/etc. research would increase the overall chance of a pandemic. But, the idea I'm getting at is you seem to be mistakenly treating the choice of halting as not bringing uncertainty other than the relative "you don't know what you could have had" kind. Personally I'd say it's usually the inherently riskier choice than just continuing, on top of having worse expected result, but hopefully you can see that the action of halting does come with at least some uncertainty of its own.

> My understanding is that diseases are classified and diagnosed by symptom, not by severity of the symptoms. That would be especially tricky as everyone will have a different reaction

Symptoms also vary by person. Diagnosis can take into account a variety of factors (medical history, blood tests, etc.), including severity, to determine the most likely identification.

Diseases are classified in documents like ICD-11, with mpox defined as caused by the monkeypox virus ("A disease caused by an infection with monkeypox virus [...] Confirmation is by identification of monkeypox virus") and smallpox as caused by the variola virus ("A disease caused by an infection with variola virus [...] Confirmation is by identification of the variola virus in a skin sample of the rash").

> If you consider smallpox eliminated because disease with a similar severity is no longer present then we likely have to consider Covid eliminated as well

If there were extant strains of smallpox, even if less virulent, I would not consider it eradicated (but it could nonetheless be a significant success of medical advancements).

I'm not aware that we've eradicated any strains of SARS-CoV-2, let alone all of them, so I see no reason to consider COVID-19 eradicated.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be suggesting that even if we did eradicate SARS-CoV-2, we shouldn't consider COVID-19 eradicated because there would still inevitably be some patients presenting with sufficiently-similar-but-less-severe symptoms from, say, influenza.

> Monkeypox and smallpox have very similar symptoms, meaning they could very well be considered the same disease even if they are believed to be caused by two different viruses.

I'm not aware of anywhere that equates the two diseases - they're different enough even just in symptoms (including severity) and response that it would seem counterproductive to do so.

If "could very well be considered the same disease" means more in terms of "well it's all just arbitrary labels - in theory we could've chosen to classify diseases more broadly" then sure, but it doesn't really take away from the accomplishment of eradicating [the thing currently know as the smallpox disease] even if it were to no longer be known as a disease on its own.

We (industrial societies) didn’t know for a long, long time that eventually, more energy usage (especially the type of energy usage we practice) would impact the planet the way that it has. Now we have the choice to put more effort into finding better ways to use the energy we have and develop newer energy tech, but populist politics and entrenched energy interests actively work against that.

AI doesn't simply use up our energy. It can also help reduce energy usage in many fields or improve energy generation. I would not be worried about energy when it comes to AI.

> it can also help reduce energy usage in many fields or improve energy generation

Do we have any examples of this happening yet?

My understanding is that these are aspirational goals of what AI could be if it is one day able to model the world around us and reason through novel approaches to solving problems.

ML models in smart thermostats learning your schedule to run HVAC more efficiently

Are we now considering ML algorithms capable of running on an embedded device AI?

Is there a minimum amount of transistors that must be consumed to be considered AI, and does this scale regularly with Moore's law?

But yes, I do :) I consider something as basic as MNIST Digit detection to be AI, even if everyone else doesn't

I don't think anyone has argues for defining AI by transistor count, at east I've never heard that take. Its based on capabilities and the question is always where does one draw the line.

It seems odd to me for the line to be so low that a simple ML algorithm running on embedded hardware would count as AI. What does the term AI mean at that point, and what term would you propose we start using for systems that are approaching or exceeding human intelligence?

To me, AI is something that learns or adapts how to perform a task, without being explicitly given instructions on it. I've almost always seen this definition used in this manner.

Something beyond human intelligence is also AI, just maybe a subset of general AI or strong AI (as opposed to narrow or weak AI).

I'll give a shit about AI energy usage when a huge swath of the population isn't needlessly forced to drive to work every day.

And that's why we'll never solve any meaningful societal issues.

If you can use less energy, or water, or plastic, or time, just do it. Who the hell cares what everyone else chooses to do?

I already am. I'm not concerned about a 0.001% increase of my footprint. There are bigger fish to fry. This is fear mongering.

I don't think I was fear mongering here, not sure if that was referencing someone else.

I also wasn't just talking about LLM energy use here. I agree most people's footprint from LLM use is extremely low relative to what else they do. There is likely lower hanging fruit, though you also must agree that doesn't mean we might as well use a little bit more just because its a small amount.

Maybe cutting LLM use out of your equation is small, but do you really need it? I'd assume not, I'd also assume there are larger items you could cut if you really looked and it wouldn't hurt your day to day life at all.

That said, I don't know you at all so I could very well be wrong on the specific case. I would stand behind the argument broadly though, most people could remove a lot of use from their lives and may even find themselves happier for it.

Yeah, the real point is that "AI uses a lot of energy: here's why you should be concerned" is just a post-hoc justification for someone who doesn't like AI and needs something to point to.

Agreed, that's not a useful argument when its posed that way. That is only one way of seeing it though.

The question, in my opinion, isn't whether LLMs are a huge energy suck and we should be worked. My question is whether its really needed at all, regardless of how much energy it may or may not use relative to other things.

People's needs really are pretty simple at the end of the day. Food, water, shelter, (the feeling of) safety, community. We just aren't good at defining enough and some people are very good at convincing us that we don't need to even consider that concept.

>Is it not still better to just avoid using all this energy though?

No, especially if there are ulterior motives of mUh eViL IA!111!1!one! as alluded to by parent commenter.

If people have problems with "AI" they should bring forth their concerns frankly on their merits, not coat it with tHiNk Of dA kIdZ! and appeal to emotions.

>Just because people waste a bunch of energy, water, wood, etc doesn't justify using it however you want,

Whoever "wastes" them is paying for them, generally speaking. If they really are concerned about the waste they'll stop of their own accord.

> Almost everything is worse than AI, basically.

I am apt to agree but I reject this whole argument completely. This is just part of a de-growth agenda where every action is looked at through the lens of scarcity. Sometimes its environment, other times its equity, but it always leads to extinguishing human flourishing.

Examples:

- Having babies is bad because it increases the carbon footprint

- Having babies is bad because world is over-populated

- Giving advantages to your children is bad because other's aren't as advantaged

- Why invest in rockets when people are starving in [country]

- Honors classes are bad because the distribution of the participants is not proportional to the population

It's all just so exhausting and at this point I refuse to engage with it at any level. There is no winning.

I don't see how discussions about how to better distribute limited resources go against "human flourishing". The opposite, actually.

The solution is to grow our way out of it — make more energy, make cleaner energy, develop new technologies — rather than browbeat people into submission with moral arguments because you don't like how they've chosen to deploy their resources.

Try putting it in a different context because I think you are weighing both “AI” and “household operation” the same. For the use case you mentioned (image generation) what do you think has a bigger impact on someone’s quality of life: 1) operating a home or 2) generating AI images?

I would argue most people would weigh the convenience of a house a lot higher. That doesn’t mean AI is a net negative, just that it’s important to frame the problem that focuses on what matters most to people (quality of life).

> what do you think has a bigger impact on someone’s quality of life: 1) operating a home or 2) generating AI images? [...] I would argue most people would weigh the convenience of a house a lot higher.

To meaningfully compare directly like this, you'd need to choose two things with similar energy usage/carbon footprint. Sure "the convenience of a house" is greater, but a person's usage of an image-generation model also consumes many orders of magnitude less energy.

For a balanced comparison:

* A full year of LLM usage (5 joules per token[0] * 200 tokens per query * 10 queries per day * 365 days per year = 1.014kWh, which by the US's energy mix[1] is about 0.4kg of CO2)

* A single cup of coffee (about 0.4kg of CO2 according to [2])

With that, I think most pepole would gain considerably more utility from the former.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.03003

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

[2]: https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/coffee

What does "operating a home" mean to you? Boiling water in the evening for tea (most people will fill the kettle up)? 100 Wh = 50 prompts? Which one's more important?

For me? The tea. To my point above, it adds a lot more to my quality of life. For someone else, it may be completely different. I’m not saying one has to be valued over the other, just that the issue should be framed more appropriately.

(Your numbers would also not be accurate for me. I warm tea in a microwave, so it’s closer to 15 W-hr)

For other people AI is a tool for education, as it can explain concepts, is never tired and doesn't get bored. What is more important, a cup of tea or understanding that one thing you never had time for.

Are we really going to go down this road of bad-faith arguing? I could easily say “what’s more important, a learning a hobby or having shelter and food?” (Besides, this goes against the HN guidelines of assuming the strongest position of the comment).

My point is not to claim one value system over another, but to frame the problem in a more appropriate light. I think, even taking your bad-faith stance above, it is still framed as “what adds more to one’s quality of life?”

This article only discusses image generation, a small subset of AI use cases. As users, governments, corporations, and background processes grow to consume AI all day the water and power issues will grow the same. Whether AI or JavaScript, action is needed ahead of shareholder value.

What water issues?

Maybe they mean the water cooling systems used in the data centers. As far as I remember, it was a closed system so I don't know if that's significant.

Of course they're a closed system. Why wouldn't they be?

Your numbers aside, how do you explain the prevailing "we need to build more power plants for AI" sentiment in some circles? Surely that indicates a significant carbon footprint.

(Especially when you consider how many are looking to coal and gas.)

Also, there's immense variation in the carbon intensity of electricity generation - an order of magnitude difference between Australia and France. How much electricity we use matters far less than how we're making that electricity.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

Honest question. I remeber some recent news about Microsoft considering to bring back in use an "old" nuclear power plant to cover their (maybe projected?) cloud power consuption due to AI. If AI's power consumption is negligible and less than a short YouTube ad anyway, why the need to bring back to operation a nuclear power plant?

An individual user's model usage is negligible, in that you should not feel bad about querying an LLM unless you feel approximately 1000 times worse about drinking a cup of coffee. But Google/Microsoft provide services for hundreds of millions, or even billions, of users.

In the same way, if your service was hairdryers (owing to progress in hot-air-over-IP) and you had 300 million users, you'd need 300 million * 2000W * 10 minutes = 100000MWh daily, or about 5 copies of the nuclear power plant the Microsoft are opening. You could look at it as those hairdryer power plants already effectively existing, just distributed as a small portion of many plants.

Yes, I get that it is an issue of scale, but that's the issue in the end. A commenter rightfully pointed out that there's no point in giving examples of other things that consume the same or more if at the end of the day we don't take action on those anyway. Another commenter, equally rightly, answered that the utility of these things are subjective, and this changes what we feel we should take action on. I still have to find a clear position on this.

> > "25,000 average-sized households per day"

> For 20 million users?

But during how many hours are these users active?

Enough for them to accumulate the work of an incredible amount of persons-hours of graphic design. Is this not ok, and instead to have a 500 watts/h TV on all day is fine?

Or having no public transportation whatsoever and move every day a 2000 kilogram vehicle with yourself inside back and forth from point A to point B? With incredible amounts of wasted energy?

Unfortunately, some people just love to count their neighbor’s expenses instead of minding their own business.

Are you claiming externalities are unimportant?

Yes, especially when effect is marginal like in this case.

You seem to be missing the collective action aspect. You’re saying the equivalent of “it doesn’t matter if I dump my car oil in the river, because it’s a negligible impact on the environment.”

It can be marginal at the individual level but very important if it scales to the societal level.

You're mixing two things together: * something that's illegal (dumping used oil into a river) * and something that's perfectly legal (buying oil)

You buy electricity and it's yours to decide how to use it. i.e. heat up your house or mine crypto.

That's a fair critique of a bad analogy. But it still misses the point of the collective action problem. Consider a different analogy: you are free to burn as much fuel as you want, and individually it doesn't make much difference. But if everyone collectively takes that same stance, it leads to large negative externalities.

IMO the extreme libertarian view works fine for small groups but does not do a good job of managing collective action problems in large societies when the scope exceeds our psychological bandwidth.

You’re not free to burn as much fuel as you want, as there are economic and physical limits in place.

What you are free to do is choose how to allocate resources—heat up or cool down your apartment, train/run a neural network, watch a plasma TV, etc.

Telling people what to do with their resources is central planning, and it has never worked.

Ignoring the fact that “central” planning is a nebulous and uninformative term, what do you propose when those “economic and physical” constraints are insufficient to mitigate the negative externalities of a collective action problem?

I'm by no means a communist or ecology maniac.

And it is true that if they sequester the CO2 that they generate, it's their entirely their business.

The problem is, the actions of others have an effect on me, my kids, and the rest of the world. One person's freedom ends where another's begins.

So whilst I generally feel people should mind their own business, I can't really see how we can just let people do whatever they want without at least having a public debate.

Sorry, mate, but it sounds like one.

Such lectures are better to conduct somewhere in ultra-luxury resorts, (flying in private jet of course), to decide what "plebs" are allowed to.

Just a couple examples of hypocrisy. 1. COP28 in Dubai (2023): The 28th UN Climate Change Conference saw approximately 644 private flights associated with the event, resulting in around 4,800 tonnes of CO₂ emissions.

2. World Economic Forum in Davos (2022): During this annual meeting, 1,040 private jets flew in and out of airports serving Davos, leading to a significant increase in emissions compared to previous years.

3. COP29 in Baku (2024): The 29th UN Climate Change Conference in Baku experienced a notable rise in private jet arrivals, with 65 private jets landing in the week leading up to the event, doubling the number from the previous year.

Yes I agree that is definitely bad optics.

I get it. Other people are worse than me, so I have no responsibility and do not have to change anything.

Same thing my kids say about their scholastic results. Very appealing, I get it.

Unfortunately it is not very constructive or responsible. It means only the very worst person has to do something while the other 8b of us can point fingers and sit back.

Sure, you can do. You can question wtf policy-makers are doing. instead, you question individuals decision (aka "how dare you") that are well within current laws.

> For 20 million users? Great, you just proved that AI energy impact is not big.

You missed that this was just a calculation of Midjourney power use, and you missed the next paragraph:

"Keep in mind that our example only touches image generation services. Let's not forget about other AI services like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Deepseek—and all their versions and variations. The list, and energy waste, continues to grow."

> Almost everything is worse than AI, basically.

I am glad you brough this up. AI just adds to it all.

> For 20 million users

So basically, if we want to help the environment, we should replace people with AI

I 100% gaurantee you don't recycle. Perfect, enemy the good. That said, couldn't agree moreabout air travel or travel in general; a monument to man's self endulgent waste.

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