Fuck AI

I hope you dont use any of the other standard quality of life features day to day that consume substantially more power per day then.

There's plenty of stuff you likely take for granted every day that you use, that burn way more fossil fuels than training GPT took.

GPT did cost a lot of power, but if you put it beside other fairly standard day-to-day things people tend to take for granted, it's a drop in the bucket.

• Air conditioning, both at your home if you use it, your work if you have it, stores you visit, etc etc
• Public transit
• Your stove
• Your microwave
• Your water kettle
• Your heating systems everywhere you go
• Your computer
• Your phone
• The internet
• Emergency response systems
• Your clothes washer and dryer

The list goes on and on. ESPECIALLY your clothes dryer, that thing uses a massive amount of power

People seriously underestimate how much power the internet uses overall. GPT's training provides a concrete, discrete, measured amount of power one specific thing used.

Whereas the internet, as a whole, over one day, uses way more power than all of GPT's training took total. The issue is "the internet" has its power consumption broadly distributed across the entire globe, in a manner that makes it basically impossible to actually measure how much "total" power you are burning just browsing the web.

But it's non trivial. Every switch between you and your destination is burning in the range of 150 watts, easily, every router is burning easily 80 watts, etc etc.

And theres dozens of those between you and 1 given destination. The process of routing your packets from your machine all the way across countries at the speed of light, and then a response back, takes a non trivial amount of power. Theres often around 8 to 15 hops between you and the destination, and every single hop tends to have multiple machines involved in that one single packet.

Its easy to handwave that enormous power consumption away because, well, you can't see it. You aren't privvy to how much power your ISP burns every day, how much power the nameservers use, etc etc.

GPT is a non trivial chunk of power... but its not THAT much compared to all the other shit going on in the web, its genuinely just a tiny drop in the bucket.

You are extremely naive if you think using GPT makes any kind of notable shift in your total carbon footprint, it doesnt even move the dial at all.

If you actually wanna pick something as a real target for reducing your carbon footprint, the two biggest contenders are:

1. Use public transit, or better yet, bike/walk/run to work. If you work from home, good!
2. Dry your clothes via hangers instead of a dryer