Comment by zdragnar 18 hours ago
The title does not match the content.
A more appropriate title is "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in comparison to everything else."
But, given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the article itself doesn't need to exist.
Because LLMs are an environmental disaster.
It's not about any individual usage. It's the global technology that is yet to prove to be useful and that already have bad for the environment.
Any new usage should be free of impact on the environment.
(Note: The technology of LLM itself is not an environmental disaster, but how it is put in use currently isn't the way).
> yet to prove to be useful
I don’t understand this perspective. It should be abundantly clear at this point that these systems are quite useful for a variety of applications.
Do they have problems? Sure. Do the AI boosters who breathlessly claim that the models are super intelligent make me cringe? Sure.
But saying that they’re not useful is just downright crazy.
> I don’t understand this perspective. It should be abundantly clear at this point that these systems are quite useful for a variety of applications.
LLM are polyvalent. But in most of the tasks they are not the most efficient way to do the task.
Want to play chess ? Use Stockfish or Leela. Want to do image recognition ? SAM or TinyViT like models. Want to know if your are sick ? Go to the doctor or at least do a search on the web.
Yes, there is tasks where LLM are perfect for (speech analysis/classification for example). But omnipotent chatbot isn't one for example.
If there were a revolutionary use, we would have a productivity boom. We don't. This article is from 2021: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/1026008/the-comi...
> It's the global technology that is yet to prove to be useful
Useful for whom, by what definition? I personally find it very useful for my day to day work, whether it be helping me write code, think through ideas, or otherwise.
> "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in comparison to everything else."
Emissions directly caused by Average Joe using ChatGPT is not significant compared to everything else. 50,000 questions is a lot for an individual using ChatGPT casually, but nothing for the businesses using ChatGPT to crunch data. 50,000 "questions" will be lucky to get you through the hour.
Those businesses aren't crunching data just for the sake of it. They are doing so ultimately because that very same aforementioned Average Joe is going to buy something that was produced out of that data crunching. It is the indirect use that raises the "ChatGPT is bad for the environment" alarm. At very least, we at least don't have a good handle on what the actual scale is. How many indirect "questions" am I asking ChatGPT daily?