Likewise, I doubt that USENET warning was ever true beyond the first few years of the networks' lifetime. Certainly if everything was connected via dial-up, yes, a single message could incur hundreds of dollars of cost when you added the few seconds of line time it took to send up across the whole world. But that's accounting for a lot of Ma Bell markup. Most connections between sites and ISPs on USENET were done through private lines that ran at far faster speeds than what you could shove down copper phone wiring back then.

Are you saying all of that new capacity is needed to power non-LLM stuff like classifiers, adtech, etc? That seems unlikely.

Had you said that inference costs are tiny compared to the upfront cost of training the base model, I might have believed it. But even that isn't accurate -- there's a big upfront energy cost to train a model, but once it becomes popular like GPT-4, the inference energy cost over time is dramatically higher than the upfront training cost.

You mentioned batch computing as well, but how does that fit into the picture? I don't see how batching would reduce energy use.

Well, partly because they (all but X, IIRC) have commitments to shift to carbon-neutral energy.

But also, from the article:

> ChatGPT is now estimated to be the fifth-most visited website in the world

That's ChatGPT today. They're looking ahead to 100x-ing (or 1,000,000x-ing) the usage as AI replaces more and more existing work.

I can run Llama 3 on my laptop, and we can measure the energy usage of my laptop--it maxes out at around 0.1 toasters. o3 is presumably a bit more energy intensive, but the reason it's using a lot of power is the >100MM daily users, not that a single user uses a lot of energy for a simple chat.

This seems like a classic tragedy of the commons, no? An individual has a minor impact, but the rationale switching to LLM tools by the collective will likely have a massive impact.

Something to temper this, lots of these AI datacenter projects are being cancelled or put on hiatus because the demand isnt there.

But if someone wants to build a nuke reactor to power their datacenter, awesome. No downsides? We are concerned about energy consumption only because of its impact on the earth in terms of carbon footprint. If its nuclear, the problem has already been solved.

Wait, any sources for that? Because everywhere I go, there seems to be this hype for more AI data centers. Some fresh air would be nice.

AI seems like it is speedrunning all the phases of the hype cycle.

"TD Cowen analysts Michael Elias, Cooper Belanger, and Gregory Williams wrote in the latest research note: “We continue to believe the lease cancellations and deferrals of capacity points to data center oversupply relative to its current demand forecast.”"

If you want to know more about energy consumption, see this 2 part series that goes into tons of nitty-gritty details: https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2024/08/18/is-ai-eating-all-th...

The article uses open source models to infer cost, because those are the only models you can measure since the organizations that manage them don't share that info. Here's what the article says:

> The largest of our text-generation cohort, Llama 3.1 405B, [...] needed 3,353 joules, or an estimated 6,706 joules total, for each response. That’s enough to carry a person about 400 feet on an e-bike or run the microwave for eight seconds.

I just looked at the last chat conversation I had with an LLM. I got nine responses, about the equivalent of melting the cheese on my burrito if I'm in a rush (ignoring that I'd be turning the microwave on and off over the course of a few hours, making an awful burrito).

How many burritos is that if you multiply it by the number of people who have a similar chat with an LLM every day?

Now that I'm hungry, I just want to agree that LLMs and other client-facing models aren't the only ML workload and aren't even the most relevant ones. As you say adtech has been using classifiers, vector engines, etc. since (anecdotally) as early as 2007. Investing algorithms are another huge one.

Regarding your USENET point, yeah. I remember in 2000 some famous Linux guy freaking out that members of Linuxcare's sales team had a 5 line signature in their emails instead of the RFC-recommended 3 lines because it was wasting the internet or something. It's hard for me to imagine what things were like back then.

If memory serves Jet A is not taxed at all federally in the case of for-profit corporations (while non-commercial users DO pay a tax!) and many states also either do not tax it or tax it very litte.

It's completely insane that we do not tax fuel usage for probably the most energy-intensive way to move people and/or goods and often that movement of people is entirely frivelous.

Eh. It's not Bill Gates and Alice Walton. Sometimes the obvious answer is the real one: It's the fossil fuel industry.

> It's completely insane that we do not tax fuel usage for probably the most energy-intensive way to move people and/or goods and often that movement of people is entirely frivelous.

That one's just the arbitrage problem. Planes move around. If there is an international flight to a country that doesn't tax jet fuel (or taxes it less) then the plane is going to fly into LAX with enough fuel still in the tank to get back to the other jurisdiction and fill up again. Which actually increases fuel consumption because fuel is heavy and they otherwise wouldn't want to do that.

This is the same reason the EU doesn't tax jet fuel.

Any reason that can't be treated as a fuel import and taxed accordingly? I understand current laws may not allow it but is that legislation impossible to write?

Joe driving to work spends a larger fraction of his income on fuel and thus fuel tax than his rich counterpart.

This is true for all "let the consumer/poluter pay" taxes, they're all regressive. They say: it's fine to burn up the world as long as you're rich.

Personally I like the idea of setting the price for emitting 1 ton of CO2 equivalent emissions to the realistic cost of capturing 1 ton of CO2. At least, that seems like a reasonable end goal for a carbon tax, since that could fully account for the negative externality. This would of course be obscenely expensive, which would be a strong incentive to lower carbon emissions where possible, and for people to consume less of products that require large emissions to make or use.

The carbon tax would also have to apply to imported goods to be effective, and tracking how much tax should apply to imports would be even more difficult than doing so for domestic sources of pollution.

Please see my comment again. Under a revenue-neutral carbon tax everyone gets money back. But they don't realize it. Costs only go up for people who emit more carbon than average.

Exhibit A: Canada's recent repudiation of their carbon tax because nobody knew they were getting rebates. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carbon-tax-rebate-rebrand-1...

> Talk to some outside of your activist bubble

That's quite condescending btw. Is it "activism" to try to avert a calamity that will increase the cost of living by a lot more 20 years from now? I think it's good fiscal sense. Long-term thinking and planning. Y'know adult shit.

> Humans are, on average, selfish beings

And easily swayed by stupid arguments. Exhibit B: Canada's recent repudiation of the carbon tax because fossil fuel industry propaganda convinced everyone that the tax was the cause of price increases. Now prices will stay the same (because the market will bear them) but no one will get any rebate money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_St...

Those were all voted in. It's a type of tax that people are happy with for whatever reason.

Even flying would only cost about 10% more for example. And most other activities have carbon free alternatives they can shift to rather than just eat the cost. Which is kind of the point.

Are solar panels convenient? All polysilicon today is made with fossil fuels, and the R&D to make it with renewable energy is still in-progress. Not to mention that we ship them across the ocean with fossil fuel.

Same thing with steel – both are critical input materials and can be made without fossil fuels, but they aren’t today. Maybe a carbon tax would fix that!

They've been implemented all over the world, because they're effective. They cover 31% of emissions in developed nations.

To whatever degree you could say they are unpopular, they're unpopular in regions where the government doing stuff about climate change (or just "the government doing stuff") is unpopular, which makes it odd to single out putting a price on carbon specifically

See where they are used here: https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/

This is one of the more hysterical things I have heard.

How would we even know it was translating animal language correctly?

You can see traffic. It's easy to understand the dangers in a collision because when you drive into something unexpectedly your body takes a hit and you get frightened since you immediately realise that it might cost you a lot of money but you don't know for sure.

Being subtly manipulated by a disgustingly subservient fake conversationalist is another thing altogether.

You underestimate the pervasiveness of AI, and in particular, ChatGPT. It is quite popular in the blue collar trades.

And yeah, a lot of them probably regard everything that ChatGPT tells them as fact.

"Rolling coal" is the practice of modifying a diesel engine—usually in pickup trucks—to increase the amount of fuel entering the engine, which causes the vehicle to emit large, thick plumes of black smoke from the exhaust. This is often done by tampering with or removing emissions control devices.

Llama 3.1: ~0.7 to 1.5 grams of CO2

Rolling coal event: ~10,000 to 100,000+ grams of CO2

You would need hundreds of lb of gasoline for that!

Yes.

I refuse to believe that anyone with a functioning brain would choose to engage in it. Are you saying you do?

Even driving your car around you at least are somewhat aware of the gas you are burning.

Emissions should be fixed on the production side (decarbonization) not on the demand side (guilt/austerity).

Scaling up battery production makes EVs more appealing on the demand side. How do you disincentivize fossil fuel production?

That’s what I said?

> Reducing demand is e.g. requiring you to drive fewer miles.

Demand can be reduced by increasing fuel prices. Either at the pump through consumption tax or at production. The effect remains the same.

> You get a car that doesn't run on petroleum and CO2 goes down while vehicle miles can stay the same or go up.

Obviously. What does that have to do with disincentivizing fossil fuel production or consumption?

The problem with fossil fuels isn’t that they pollute, but that most of the negative impact of that pollution is borne by others. This results in an artificially low price which distorts the market and results in economically inefficient overuse.

Capture that cost by making producers pay a tax of the corresponding amount, and market forces will use the “right” amount of fossil fuels in ways that are a net benefit.

Or, even worse God forbid, think about how much carbon is produced to create a single bottle or carton of water. Then consider how casually people down bottles of water.

A google search claims water use uses 12.7% of US energy.

Another search gave 11.7% US energy goes to powering AI (projected to increase to roughly 25% by 2030).

Taking into account hydropower power provides 6.2% of US energy, I feel comfortable saying your statement isn't true.

To further strengthen my statement, I would like to point out another statistic. NPR gives us an estimate of 300K gallons of water use/day to cool the average data center. That pretty much guarantees an LLM query produces more carbon than my filling a cup from a gravity fed water system filled by rain.

Funny how this suddenly became a thing after electrification became a thing. Need to find a new way to wag the finger after all.

The oil industry is a conglomerate of degenerates spamming boomer logic all the way down to the workers. Their memes propagate throughout society and lead to the other boomer characteristic of rewriting personal and societal history.

The finger waggers now are being programmed to pretend they talked about tire particulates and the carheads are being programmed to pretend they never cared about 0-60. This another "We have always been at war with Eastasia", just like they all opposed the Iraq war from day 1 and didn't cancel the Dixie Chicks, et cetra.

This may have been discussed in specialist literature somewhere but even when I did ecology courses in university circa 2001ish, I never heard about tire particulates, while I did hear a lot about greenhouse gasses.

It's a concern but not a civilization ending concern like climate change. I low key resent these attempts to move goalposts to satisfy the writer's urge for negativity.

Consider that a bus has six to ten tires that each weigh around ten times more than a typical car tire. This is presented as the alternative to cars, is it even any different? Not implausible that it could actually be worse, especially if the bus isn't at full occupancy at all times.

Meanwhile the weight difference between EVs and petroleum cars is emphasized in the complaints, even though it isn't very large, while the much larger weight difference between any cars and buses is ignored. Because the point isn't to complain about tires, it's to complain about EVs.

And if the point actually was to complain about tires then you still wouldn't be talking about EVs, you would be talking about tires and how to make them shed less or construct them out of lower toxicity materials etc.

To make those sorts of calculations easy, you can ignore all the pressure/usage/etc nonsense and just do basic math on tire dimensions (including min/max tread depth and width, not just radius, though I typically ignore siping and whatnot) and typical longevity. Volume lost per mile driven is basic high-school arithmetic, and the only real questions are regarding data quality and whether the self-imposed constraints (e.g., examining real-world wear rather than wear given optimal driving or something) are reasonable.

Harder rubber seems like it could make a difference, but then you could also put tires with harder rubber on a car.

You can get a heavier vehicle to have the same pressure at the road by using more and bigger tires, but then the problem is that the tires are bigger and there are more of them.

> plus its normal driving patterns have less wear than typical Tesla use.

Isn't a city bus constantly starting and stopping, both as a result of city traffic and picking up and dropping off passengers?

> To make those sorts of calculations easy, you can ignore all the pressure/usage/etc nonsense and just do basic math on tire dimensions (including min/max tread depth and width, not just radius, though I typically ignore siping and whatnot) and typical longevity.

I tried plugging these in and it still comes out as a 6-wheel commercial bus has several times the tire wear as a 4-wheel light truck, rather than being the same.

And I expected the difference to be even more, but I guess that goes to show how much the weight argument is motivated reasoning if ~7x the weight is only ~3x the tire wear and then people are complaining about something which is only ~1.2x the weight.

Pardon me if I ask the obvious question, but did you divide your result by the average number of people moved? Because that's the actual utility of mass vs. individual transport. I would find it rather surprising if tire wear was the one measure were buses didn't win out.

Tire temperature also will play a big roll in tire wear, and I wouldn't expect bus tires to get very hot only rolling half the time and at a lower speed than the typical car.

And of course you also gotta factor in passenger count. Buses generally have more than just 1 or 2 people, while the vast majority of cars will have 1 or 2 people most of the time. And even if a bus tires were to wear out twice as fast as a car's tire, that is still less wear per person than a car.

No bus tires to not typically last 500k miles. <100k is the norm, and really not more than a long-life car tire.

They do get retreaded more often than car tires do, but that just means they get new rubber added regularly.

My city buses in peak travel hours have anywhere from 20 to 75 people on them. Even if we assume that every one of those folks would have carpooled (which rarely happens), we're looking at a lot of cars, and thus tires, on the road.

This is really the problem with buses outside of extremely high density areas. (And extremely high density areas should have subways.)

You get off work at 5PM, you want to go to an entertainment venue and then go home at 10PM. You can find a full bus a 5:15PM that will take you there because it's rush hour, but then you can't get home on the bus because there is no bus service after 9PM. Which means you can't take the bus there during rush hour either, because you need your car to be there so you can get home.

Or, you can run mostly-empty buses in the darkness hours, but there goes your efficiency.

Is there a way to quantify this? My experience as well is that the tire particulate pollution has mostly been an anti-EV talking point.

The biggest problem with tailpipe emissions used to be horrendous smog. That was mostly solved in many places, and now the biggest problem is the impact on the global climate.

The biggest issue with childhood mortality used to be disease. Now we (correctly) focus more on accidental deaths.

EVs solved tailpipe emissions, but they’re not perfect. Their biggest problem is just something else.

There’s been decades of lies about climate change. And once the truth got out society was already massively dependent on it. For cars specifically it was a deliberate policy to make e.g. the US car-dependent. And once the truth got undeniable the cope was switched to people’s “carbon footprint” (British Petroleum). In fact there are rumors that the cope echoes to this day.

Zoom out enough and it becomes obviously unproductive to make “mass ignorance” the locus of attention.

Do you really think the average person could within 2 orders of magnitude when estimating their carbon footprint for a year?

Why? AI isn't a human being. We have no obligation to be "fair" to it.

I can picture an Elizabeth Holmesian cartoon clutching her diamond necklace.

"Oh, won't somebody think of the tech billionaires?!"

If you don't freak out about running your shower or microwave for a couple seconds or driving a few hundred feet

The basic premise of the modern tech industry is scale. It's not one person running a microwave for a couple of seconds, it's a few billion people running a microwave for the equivalent of decades.

So yes let’s hand wring over AI and continue to do nothing about everything else. And we’ll probably do nothing about AI either, but the endless articles will no doubt keep people distracted.

Political lobbying.

“We care”. Because British Petroleum told us to care.[1] Now the new scapegoat grift is how many prompts you use to make your “creative” wedding invitations. Nevermind industrial use though. We’ll just hammer every little API or just endpoint, slurp up the data, then do the same thing tomorrow because why cache? Keep it simple. It’s not our cost.[2] No one will scold us (that can get to us).

Public service announcement huh. Let’s just fall for it again.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44046315

[2] https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

The only purpose is to scapegoat the possible environmental or economic fallout. Might as well put it on individuals. Like what’s always done.

I’ve already seen it on the national broadcast. There some supposed experts were wagging their fingers about using AI for “fun”. Making silly images.

Meanwhile we’re gonna put AI to good use in arms races: more spam (automated applications, ads, ads, ads, abuse of services) and anti-spam. There’s gonna be so much economic activity. Disruptive.

So they used to send this message, but then it stopped I assume. Costs lowered a lot or the benefits outweighed all associated costs. Same can happen here.

How is this even quantifiable?

How about this. Before using AI to make fake images and help kids cheat on their homework, we take it offline and use it to solve it's own problem of energy use.

You know what this does not happen? Because the goal is profit and the profit comes not from solving real important problem, but by making people think it is helping them solve made up problems.