Comment by crakhamster01
Comment by crakhamster01 2 months ago
One miss in this post is that the author tries to make their point by comparing energy consumption of LLMs to arbitrary points of reference. We should be comparing them to their relevant parallels.
Comparing a ChatGPT query to an hour long Zoom call isn't useful. The call might take up ~1700 mL of water, but that is still wildly more efficient than what we used to do prior - travel/commute to meet in person. The "10x a Google search" point is relevant because for many of the use cases mentioned in this post and others like it (e.g. "try asking factual questions!"), you could just as easily get that with 1 Google search and skimming the results.
I have found use for LLMs in software development, but I'd be lying if I said I couldn't live without it. Almost every use case of an LLM has a simple alternative - often just employing critical thinking or learning a new skill.
It feels like this post is a long way of saying "yes, there are negative impacts, but I value my time more".
I basically do think that at some threshold it's important to weigh your time against negative impacts. I personally avoid taking flights whenever I can because of the climate and think that's worth my time relative to the emissions saved, but I also never worry about optimizing the energy use of my digital clock because that would take too much time relative to the emissions I could save. ChatGPT exists somewhere between those two things, and my argument in the post is that it's much closer to the digital clock.