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Comment by venk12 | Hacker News Reader

We've moved past asking where the energy comes from or how our planet will survive this critical phase.

These days, it's about framing - every country is scrambling to up their game just to stay in power. The companies that are riding this wave are spending millions in marketing, lobbying and billions on consuming energy so that they can make trillions in valuation.

I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it.

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> I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it.

This is by far the best article I've seen on it [0]. Which leads me to conclude: if you use coding agents, then yes, it's definitely a concern. Yet if you drive daily, even an EV, it's very small compared to that. Let alone flying. Personally, even if my "AI emissions" are at 10x his estimated usage (they almost certainly aren't), the other sacrifices I make to reduce emissions have such an impact that I'd still be multiple times below the national average.

Note how the above measures energy usage (kWh), not emissions. For anyone taking fossil fuel transit regularly, whether ICE car/taxi/airplane, AI usage is all but guaranteed to be meaningless compared to their transport emissions. One hamburger is at least 5x more emissions than his "median say with Claude Code", so there's another one. If you're feeling guilty, track how much beef you're eating, cut it down by 20% and use agents to your hearts content.

Now of course, a different form of AI usage like image generation and especially video generation is incomparably more energy-intensive per query. We'd need separate math on that.

[0] https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/

> the other sacrifices I make

This frames the dilemma that you just need to make this little sacrifice so Trillion.ai can make it's trillion. We shouldn't sacrifice anything.

That applies the exact same way when talking about buying a new Revuelto from Lamborghini, or even a hamburger from McD's. There's nothing special about Trillion.ai's profit, nor its emissions, that make it any different. If I want to do either of those, and I don't want to feel guilty about it, then I need to make sacrifices elsewhere. A lot more sacrifices than if I spent a day using Trillion.ai to write some code, in truth.

The key word is "feel" which has a direct and causal relationship to societal programming which is directly impacted if not dictated by media/marketing _ both of which are heavily influenced by big players who encourage the consumer to feel guilty while paying both for the resource they are using AND it's markup which is ostensibly used for marketing and the consumption guilt "feeling" feedback loop grows.

> both of which are heavily influenced by big players who encourage the consumer to feel guilty while paying both for the resource they are using

Hah, if only. Man, I wish that companies succeeded in doing that, then we'd have a lot more people making such sacrifices. That'd be great.

No one wants their customer to feel guilty because it makes them less likely to buy the product. It's the worst nightmare of any marketer.

I agree with your statement, but the difference is we all will pay higher electricity costs whether we use it or not. That's the difference between Mc.D's and AI.

Yet another example of socialize the costs, privatize the profits (except AI isn't profitable yet, lol)

But that too goes for the others all the same. We all pay with our health because some people fly with private jets, or drive Lambos, or indeed eat hamburgers every day. Our health being quite the more precious resource than our money.

But even on the subject of electricity costs. It looks like the biggest electricity consuming sector globally is.. the oil industry! So we're back to the Lambo drivers.

Indeed, it's all bullshit.

But it's the bullshit some people like so it's not going to go away soon.

It’s not clear from the article, but do these statistics taken into account the amount of electricity and water required to train the model in addition to inference?

For example, the article says their daily average use of Claude code is similar to the dishwasher running. Is that just including inference or also training Opus 4.5?

This is a great question. To my understanding the industry consensus is that for the big three providers, energy spend on inference had already surpassed training by summer last year, and the former's share only keeps increasing. The problem is that there's no hard data in public.

What we need to do here is write an article that makes a wild claim in either direction ("99% is inference!"), post it on HN, and wait for the comments to roll in that prove it right or wrong.

> sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens

There's nothing particularly worse about money spent on AI vs. anything else. I don't feel guilty for having 6 shirts even though I can only wear one at a time.

> how our planet will survive this critical phase.

> trillions in valuation.

This is more or less literally the "yes we destroyed the planet, but for a brief moment we created trillions in shareholder value" meme. Perhaps we need to take a step back and ask to what extent this benefits humans as humans, not as economic units. Especially given the explicit threat in the AI marketing material to destroy all creative industries and replace human fulfilment and even connection with AI.

We were told the "paperclip maximizer" as a cautionary tale. Instead, we constructed the "valuation maximizer".

There are people who recognize there is a problem and would support collective action to fix it, and there are those that don't. As long as you are in the first group, there's nothing else you can individually do to make a difference.

What if I was in the first group, but abandoned them after being lied to? Told how important it was for ME to take public transit and drive an EV, only for AI to march in and consume multiple nation's worth of energy. That's not "collective" , that's "rules for thee but not for me".

Well yeah, I agree, collective action would be actually collective. I'm not gonna try to prescribe something like taxes or infrastructure changes, but stuff like that.

You're just describing individual action, which like you said, isn't gonna do anything.

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