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Umm, hate to break it to you, but by the time you load up an open weights model, the environmental externality has already happened

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This is a fair point - and well taken.

However, I never asked for LLMs nor did my consumer nor professional behavior send market signals that I would use them. They were thrust upon me apropos of nothing.

Now that I find them useful, the least I can do is stop making the problem worse.

As a rule of thumb the energy use to produce a silicon wafer is roughly equal to the energy it will use in its lifetime. For GPU and VRAM this is considerable. To equip yourself with the capability to run an LLM locally is making an upfront investment in the production of extremely toxic and resource intensive products.

Why buy a personal EV with 600 mile range that sits idle 95% of the time when you can take a bus (aka the cloud) that maximizes the resource utilization?

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