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Comment by ramon156 | Hacker News Reader

I would also love to see the statistics regarding token cost, electricity cost, environmental damage etc.

Not saying that this only happens with LLMs, in fact it should be compared against e.g. a dev team of 4-5

The complex thing is that you would need to take into account the energy used to feed the programmers, the energy used for their education or simply them growing up to the age they are working. For the LLMs it would have to take into account energy used for the GPU, the machine building the GPUs, datacenters, engineers maintaining it, their education etc etc. It’s so complex to really estimate these things from bottom up if you are not only looking locally, it feels impossible…

It is well known that a programmer that stops programming stops requiring food

If they are not programming then they could have more time to produce food themselves without using machines relying on energy (traditional vs industrial agriculture).

Yes. I absolutely agree. To fully optimize this system we must enact breeding restrictions to reduce the energy demands from the humans.

> It’s so complex to really estimate these things

Is it? Use dollar cost of salary and cost for the AI. That wraps up all those things you mentioned.

Generally, if something costs less it has less environmental impact.

Generally wrong. It may cost less because its externalities aren't priced in.

If you exterminate the replaced human coders, sure.

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