Came across an interesting read on ChatGPT the other day:
We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it.One of the things that really jumped out at me and realized nobody is really talking about (especially here, what with the underlying environmental messages to the original blog) is the environmental impact of this fool thing. As Dan McQuillan put it,
"ChatGPT is a part of a reality distortion field that obscures the underlying extractivism and diverts us into asking the wrong questions and worrying about the wrong things. Instead of expressing wonder, we should be asking whether it's justifiable to burn energy at 'eye watering' rates to power the world's largest bullshit machine."The burning energy at "eye watering" rates is a direct reference to
this conversation with Sam Altman on Twitter (
screencap for posterity), where he says, and I quote,
"we will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering"That was back at the beginning of December, after they'd only crossed the one million
total user mark.
So, I got curious, and found this:
The Carbon Footprint of ChatGPT which takes a pretty decent stab at extrapolating its carbon footprint using more known bits, but seems to be generous in assuming it's less terrible than it may actually be, given Altman's statements. Using that article's numbers of about 414kgCO2e for 1 million users in 18 days, and keeping in mind that
ChatGPT was used over 100 million times in January and usage keeps growing, what with
Microsoft now integrating it into Bing and Edge? With plans to make it ubiquitous in its usage on the internet? That's what... low-ball napkin math of 41+ metric tons of CO2e in January alone for
only 100 million active monthly users, assuming each user
only used it once? On top of the 552 tons just to train it? That's annual McMansion carbon footprint territory here in the first two months of public usage for a
bullshit generator, not counting the training set. And that same bullshit generator still sufficiently malfunctioned enough to get
Nothing, Forever suspended from Twitch for eventually auto-generating transphobic content.
And let's not forget
Sam Altman's a doomsday prepper that is preparing for the collapse of civilization. This is the same CEO of OpenAI
who told Forbes of ChatGPT,
"I think that if AGI really truly fully happens, I can imagine all these ways that it breaks capitalism."Typical tech-bro bullshit, and completely in line with every other Elon Musk huxter bullshit technology outfit. Burn the world, under-deliver promises of the glorious singularity hyped to space and back, greenwash, and pump and dump just to make money. Just like all the other techbro bullshit that's promised to "revolutionize" the world. I'd say dump the entire outfit into the ocean, but that's just gonna release even more heavy metals and plastics into the sea.
