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People on Lemmy love to cry AI IS BURNING THE PLANNET but have they ever really looked at the numbers?
- 1 kg Beef = 60kg CO2 - source
- 1000km Return flight = 314kg CO2 - source
- 1 Bitcoin transaction = 645kg of CO2 - source
- 1000 AI prompts = 3kg of CO2 - source including training
I'm a strong advocate for privacy, and I myself am Anti generative AI in many ways, but can we please stop shouting that AI IS BRUNING THE PLANNET, it weakens our position to push back at actual issues with AI like privacy.
Here is a detailed breakdown debunking that AI is destroying the planet: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
I think it's interesting that this very much depends on the coin. This article compares Bitcoin to Monero, and here are the figures (per transaction per year):
So Monero is ~63x more efficient than Bitcoin at transactions, and that's with all the overhead Monero bakes in to its transactions to maintain privacy (each transaction generates a bunch of fake transactions to mislead snoops, and it's notoriously ASIC/GPU inefficient).
I'm guessing the same is true for different AI models, some models will be a lot more wasteful than others in their training and queries.
I agree, the opposition to LLMs is misplaced. There are legitimate reasons to dislike it, and there are certainly policy changes we should make, but attacking it for energy use in the weakest way to oppose it. If LLMs ran on 100% green energy, would you still oppose them? Probably, so figure out why you oppose it and attack LLMs over that, and perhaps policy can alleviate the worst of those concerns.
Thanks, this is exactly my point