one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.

  • Flying Squid
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    69 months ago

    Oh, well as long as it save you from Googling it’s okay that it’s a massive ecological disaster. My mistake.

    • FaceDeer
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      69 months ago

      That’s the opposite of what he said. That sort of usage isn’t what ChatGPT is good for, it’s best to use it for other kinds of things.

      • Flying Squid
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        -19 months ago

        It’s best to not use it. At all.

        • FaceDeer
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          59 months ago

          Feel free not to, I guess. But again, that wasn’t the point of my comment. You mistook bleistift2’s statement in the opposite way it was intended. ChatGPT’s not intended as a replacement for a search engine so evaluating it on that basis is misleading.

        • @[email protected]
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          29 months ago

          That’s just like… your opinion, man.

          AI is going to be an important tool in the future. Decrying it as bad is similar to folks saying investing in green energy was stupid because without economies of scale they were expensive and inefficient.

          Computers are using more energy. Instead of turning them off, let’s find ways to produce energy less destructively, such as nuclear which would benefit EVs and all energy usage.

          • Flying Squid
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            09 months ago

            AI is going to be an important tool in the future.

            The future for the people who aren’t dying of thirst due to the lack of water?

                • @[email protected]
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                  9 months ago

                  Then solar. Wind. Geothermal. Whatever. Energy usage is never, ever going down unless population does and probably not even then. If that silicon isn’t used for AI it’ll be something else. Then what?

                  • Flying Squid
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                    09 months ago

                    Ah, you’re one of the ‘we shouldn’t do anything about ecological disasters because something else will come along and make things just as bad anyway’ crowd. I hear that’s the latest right-wing school of thought now that it’s almost impossible to deny climate change is happening.

    • @[email protected]
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      29 months ago

      I mean an argument could be made here, right? Just thinking theoretically.

      Maxim: we want to be as eco-friendly as possible.

      Per a given task, understand the least environmentally-taxing way to accomplish the goal.

      Task requires one, two, or three/four DuckDuckGo searches? DDG away.

      Task requires five DDG searches, OR one LLM query? Language model it is.

      (LLM may well rarely be the answer there, of course, just laying out the theory!)