Comment by Retric
Not so fast, billions of investment wasn’t spent on just 50 GWh of electricity.
The final step of training one specific model might have used 50 GWh which only costs what 0.011 billion? What the fuck do you think they are spending the rest of that money on?
And what do you think environmental impact of that spending was?
Most of that money went into infrastructure + human talent, with energy costs at the tail end. I'd be happy to include the energy costs of producing the materials, feeding the humans and moving them around etc. but those aren't usually included in environmentalist critiques of the energy used in training. I couldn't use the original article to unpack every possible interpretation of how much energy was used without it turning into a book. If we did the same for plane rides we'd also need to include the energy cost of assembling the planes, training and feeding the human pilots etc.