Super happy to see something like this getting traction. As someone that is trying to reduce my carbon footprint sometimes I feel bad about asking any model to do something trivial. With something like that perhaps the guilt will lessen
If I remember correctly hyperscalers put their green agendas in stasis now that LLMs are around and that makes me believe that there is a CO2 cost associated.
Still, any improvement is a good news and if diffusion models replace autoregressive models we can invest that surplus in energy in something else useful for the environment.
I reckon it might incidentally happen if optimising for cost of power depending how correlated that is to carbon intensivity of power generation, which admittedly I haven't thought through.
[0] https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...