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Comment by lucianbr | Hacker News Reader

How much of that 500 TWh would disappear if you round to zero everything that consumes 3GWh per day or less? And keep in mind you are calculating for a single app (ChatGPT), nor for an entire industry or tech. Don't look at "civil aviation" but at each airline in particular.

I suspect nearly all of it. You framed it such that it appears insignificant, but with this framing nothing is significant.

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ChatGPT is probably the majority of LLM use today, so this is not the equivalent of claiming that neither your car nor mine nor anybody else's uses more than 3GWh per day and therefore cars don't use a significant amount of energy collectively.

Also, though this is not really relevant to your major incorrect point, airlines aren't part of civil aviation.

Do you think they're part of the military? Maybe think again.

You're right; I was wrong. Thanks for the correction! I was confusing civil aviation with general aviation.

I guess I'd frame it another way: how many LLM conversations a month would you have to have to increase your energy consumption by 1% vs how many more hot showers

if you are actually worried about your ChatGPT energy usage, skip a hot shower or spend a few hours less playing Cyberpunk 2077 and a few more hours reading an old book.

I definitely think breaking out ChatGPT on its own is too fine-grained. At the very least, one should lump all LLM training and use, or perhaps all deep learning training and use together.

I suspect at a "sensible" breakdown (trying to avoid the "How long is my coastline?" problem), which is presumably something akin to Zipfian, the main uses will actually account for most energy usage.

If anyone can find a breakdown at the level of granularity that "all deep learning" would make sense, let me know: so far my Googling has led primarily to either detailed breakdowns of energy _sources_, or high-level breakdowns of use at the level of "industry", "agriculture", or "residential use".

"No raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood."

hm, sure, but the guy peeing into the flood probably isn't responsible, at least by the standards that we usually levy responsibility

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