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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

According to ChatGPT it takes at least 3 kWh to desalinate 1000l of salt-water.

Following that math and its estimates on solar panels that would come down to 0.003 m^2 of solar panels per liters.

UAE is about 83.6 billion m^2, lets assume half of that can be covered in solar panels, so that would be enough to desalinate 13 trillion liters of water.

That sounds like it could be enough for a country like UAE by a factor of 10, if ChatGPT's math is right (probably not) and water can be desalinated instantly (probably not).

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If your thought experiment leads you to consider that half the country, or even 5% of the country, should be covered in solar panels, then there a problem somewhere.

So your reference is “According to ChatGPT”. Did you feel anything when typing this?

So, your argument is "you used ChatGPT for this". They didn't even write the comment with GPT, they just used it as a starting point for some napkin math. The other commenter not only dismissed the idea, but also emphasized how unrealistic and poorly planned it is by responding to the contents of the content, including how absurd it would be to implement that much solar coverage. I'm sure it's fun to make fun of the large language model, but at least it provided some drive to the conversation, even if its value was in being corrected. Did you feel like your addition was significant?

No, I didn‘t intend to make an argument, I was asking a genuine question because I‘m trying to understand the perspective on the world of people who consider LLM a kind of „source“. To me OP reads like “according to my Ouija board” and I’m frightened by the idea that people on HN are using the output of LLM as “quotable facts” (and not as a tool to start further research outside of it, which would be fine IMO.) I’d like to know if the poster had any doubts using ChatGPT as a source of fact to base their calculations on, when they obviously had access to the internet with all necessary sources to properlt calculate an answer for this basic question.

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