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Comment by wallfacer | Hacker News Reader

If the top ten takeaways are ok using incredibly vaporous, non-sensical phrasing why would I dig any deeper?

“the number of AI incidents and controversies has increased 26 times since 2012”

Ok but how many “incidents,” also detectably fake deepfakes and call-monitoring inmates are top examples of misuse? Naive.

“BLOOM’s training run emitted 25 times more carbon than a single air traveler on a one-way trip from New York to San Francisco”

What does this mean? That sounds like a very small amount to me but the conclusion is that’s a huge environmental impact. No, I read, for the carbon cost of decommissioning one old jet, we can have a new LLM.

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Not decommissioning one jet: just one fraction of a percent of one jet ride.

Honestly seems like a good tradeoff.

The utility of effective models (which can be used many times over) likely exceeds the utility of virtually any person travelling anywhere one time. That seems like a poorly thought statistic to mention. It makes me wonder if it’s misunderstood or misinterpreted.

Total passengers’ CO2/journey (KG) 292.50 according to https://applications.icao.int/icec/Home/Index

This is roughly a 400 mile car trip, or about a year of breathing.

Those are 100% not comparable metrics.

What you breathe out is mostly what you eat, and most of the carbon there is part of a continuous carbon cycle. A part of it comes from fossil fuels, mainly transport and energy to power the Haber Bosch (the source of most of (organic) hydrogen in your body).

LLM training process consumes practically only energy. As such, it could very easily be replaced by carbon-neutral sources (nuclear, solar).

All of the CO2 of a airplane flight comes from fossil fuels, and there is not viable technology to replace that yet.

not comparable from a climate change perspective, but helps put perspective into just how much CO2 that is. I disagree with you that it's unhelpful, context is always helpful.

> BLOOM’s training run emitted 25 times more carbon than a single air traveler on a one-way trip from New York to San Francisco

Less than the cost to send the SF Giants to play the NY Yankees then?

I wonder how many SF to NY carbon units Stanford expends each year to send their various sports teams out to do important work?

This game is fun!

I agree! So many more possibilities too, like for example rather than simply downloading and locally storing the movie Predator once I am forced to hunt down a provider who currently has it and stream it directly each time I want to watch it. Between google, the streaming provider, the cost of all the extra networking equipment required to support this data, and the extra cost on end-user devices themselves I wonder what the carbon cost of copyright is?

They are using it as an example but, if you take all of the training across all organizations it represents a huge carbon footprint due to training. Also, inference isn't exactly free either . Open sourcing your weights and putting them downloadable would get rid of that but on the other hand you have trade secrets that would make you not want to release your weights so inevitable another group will reproduce your weights and use more electricity.

I wonder how the carbon footprint of training every single large language model that exists today compares to the carbon footprint of a single day of global air traffic.

That question is unanswerable so its weird to wonder about it...

Is it? I wonder about unanswerable questions all the time.

What's answerable isn't even clear in advance most of the time, for many scientific, philosophical, and mathematical questions! Questions that are not obviously answerable often turn out to be really productive, important, or interesting, too.

I bet it's a smaller carbon footprint than dogecoin.

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