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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

>Just doesn't seem worth pointing out the carbon footprint of AI just yet.

Of course it does. It's not like AI replaced anything you mentioned. Its carbon footprint comes on top of it.

The benefit is secondary if the end result just means more carbon dioxide.

I meant more that the % is so low that even if the usage is on top of all other usage (not a completely clear statement to make), it's like starting to mention any other thing in the long tail of technology leaving behind a "massive carbon footprint". Yes, it matters, especially if you were making a report focused on sources of carbon footprint, but in general, saying "AI carbon footprint is bad" just seems like wanting to give it a bad name. In reality AI tech doesn't seem to be such a big contributor percentage-wise. Of course it should still be optimized, not arguing that.

"carbon footprint" for any computational technology is a ridiculous notion anyway: it's all electricity, and electricity is source independent.

Just because the carrier of energy is source independent, doesn't mean the consumer of that energy is not responsible for the carbon emissions of its production. Since we're talking hundreds of TWh[1], the policies of those consumers can have a massive impact on global emissions.

[1] https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and...

> It's not like AI replaced anything you mentioned.

I mean it's true it hasn't replaced anything the OP mentioned, but it has definitely replaced parts of the compute that I would normally use for e.g. searching.

But do you now spend less time on the computer?

If people are activating Google's servers less, that's some energy saved. I don't know how it compares, but I guess OpenAI aren't running a live bidding war with advertisers on every request.

> If people are activating Google's servers less, that's some energy saved

Instead of google's server people are accessing OpenAi servers, which wastes even more power. How is that any better?

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