Re:AI, but at What Cost? Breakdown of AI's Carbon Footprint
by Ukv on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @10:46AM
(#42853628)
> what do you think has a bigger impact on someone’s quality of life: 1) operating a home or 2) generating AI images? [...] I would argue most people would weigh the convenience of a house a lot higher.
To meaningfully compare directly like this, you'd need to choose two things with similar energy usage/carbon footprint. Sure "the convenience of a house" is greater, but a person's usage of an image-generation model also consumes many orders of magnitude less energy.
For a balanced comparison:
* A full year of LLM usage (5 joules per token[0] * 200 tokens per query * 10 queries per day * 365 days per year = 1.014kWh, which by the US's energy mix[1] is about 0.4kg of CO2)
* A single cup of coffee (about 0.4kg of CO2 according to [2])
With that, I think most pepole would gain considerably more utility from the former.
To meaningfully compare directly like this, you'd need to choose two things with similar energy usage/carbon footprint. Sure "the convenience of a house" is greater, but a person's usage of an image-generation model also consumes many orders of magnitude less energy.
For a balanced comparison:
* A full year of LLM usage (5 joules per token[0] * 200 tokens per query * 10 queries per day * 365 days per year = 1.014kWh, which by the US's energy mix[1] is about 0.4kg of CO2)
* A single cup of coffee (about 0.4kg of CO2 according to [2])
With that, I think most pepole would gain considerably more utility from the former.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.03003
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
[2]: https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/coffee