this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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The energy costs are overblown. An response costs about 3Wh, which is about 1 minute of runtime for a 200W Pc, or 10 Seconds of a 1000W microwave. See the calculations made here and below for the energy costs. if you want to save energy, go vegan and ditch your car; completely disbanding ChatGPT amounts for 0,0017% of the CO2 Reduction during Covid 2020 (this guy gave the numbers, but had an error in magnitude, which i fixed in my reply, calculator output is attached. It would help climate activists if they concentrated on something that is worthwhile to criticize.
If i read a book, and use phrases out of that book in my communication, it is covered under fair use - the same should be applicable for scraping the web, or else we can close the internet archive next. Since LLM output isn't copyrightable, i see no issues with that - and copyright law in the US is an abomination which is only useful for big companies to use as a weapon, small artists don't really profit from that.
The costs for responses are overblown, but the costs for training are not.
Adding the cost for training, which is a one time cost, to ChatGPT raises the power consumption from 3W to 4W. That's the high-end calculation btw.