It's like if I said I was concerned about factory farming impacts and you showed me a video of meat packaging at a grocery store, claiming it alleviates my concerns.
> Training GPT-4 used 50 GWh of energy. Like the 20,000 households point, this number looks ridiculously large if you don’t consider how many people are using ChatGPT.
> Since GPT-4 was trained, it has answered (at minimum) about 200,000,000 prompts per day for about 700 days. Dividing 50GWh by the total prompts, this gives us 0.3Wh per prompt. This means that, at most, including the cost of training raises the energy cost per prompt by 10%, from 10 Google searches to 11. Training doesn’t add much to ChatGPT’s energy cost.
https://andymasley.substack.com/i/162196004/training-an-ai-m...
If you're able to serve delicious pizzas afterwards, it was worth wasting the first kg (you might call it an investment).
If you're able to bring value to millions of users, it was worth to invest a few GWh into training.
You might disagree on the usefulness. I think, you shouldn't have wasted a kg of flour because I won't ever eat your pizzas anyway. But many (you, your guests, ChatGPT users) might think it was worth it.
If you use 300 lbs of flour to learn, and 300 lbs of flour to make 300 pizzas, then the total flour cost is 2 lbs of flour per pizza.
If you instead went on to produce millions of pizzas for people and 30,000lb of flour, that 300lb you used to learn looks like a pretty reasonable investment.
I mean, I guess advances could plateau and we stop spending exponentially more energy year after year...
I'm not opining on whether it's a good idea (I doubt we ever voluntarily consume less as a species), but data centres use a lot of energy and billions are being spent building them. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/26/1104516/three-mi...
https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/04/11/as-demand-for...
To make it worse, the model training cost only refers to the cost of the training itself. The externalities - everyone else being forced to drastically upscale their compute power because scraper blocking isn't foolproof - are, as usual for hypercapitalism, conveniently ignored.
AI training in its current form is unsustainable, I'd go as far to say it's a threat for the open and decentralized Internet as you have all but zero chance of standing alone against the flood of training scraper bots and more and more control gets ceded to Cloudflare et al.