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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

a single hot shower uses more Watt-hours than most people spend on ChatGPT in a week, or a month. if people really want to cut down on how many watt-hours they're using on frivolous things there are dozens of things they should do first. if people are spending time worried about their ChatGPT energy use more than they are spending time going vegan or getting used to cold showers then they have been grossly misinformed about what the relative impact is

(to be clear: I'm not vegan. but most people, incl. myself, could be quite easily, and it would save several orders of magnitude more energy and water)

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Ultimately we're trying to persuade people to reduce their quality of life in order to reduce their energy footprint. That's already a difficult sell. It becomes an impossible sell when any reductions that might be achieved are immediately offset by a new energy-hungry technology coming online - especially when the long-term effect (goal, even) is to reduce yet further the quality of life of everyday people.

convincing people to change anything is very hard, so why are people spending time wringing their hands over LLM use? if you convinced one person to go vegan or get into cold showers for a year you'd do more for the planet than convincing a hundred people not to pick up ChatGPT

I'm actually not wringing my hands over people choosing to use LLMs - I'm wringing my hands over the irresponsibility of the tech world in introducing and making available a technology whose existence will be responsible for a big chunk of the expected doubling of datacentre energy use over the next decade.

But the environmental aspects aren't even my main concern: my main concern is where that energy is coming from - and how the idea of Three Mile Island being restarted solely for Microsoft's benefit marks a huge shift (that no-one seems to have noticed) towards infrastructure that was previously at least nominally for public use being reserved for the use of a private corporation.

I'm also annoyed by the kleptocratic attitude towards training data, but I'll happily accept that reasonable minds may differ on that subject.

So while I don't use LLMs myself for ethical reasons, I don't have a problem with other people choosing to use them.

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