Simon Willison’s Weblog

What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? Inspired by Andy Masley's cheat sheet (which I linked to last week) Hannah Ritchie explores some of the numbers herself.

Hanah is Head of Research at Our World in Data, a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford (bio) and maintains a prolific newsletter on energy and sustainability so she has a lot more credibility in this area than Andy or myself!

My sense is that a lot of climate-conscious people feel guilty about using ChatGPT. In fact it goes further: I think many people judge others for using it, because of the perceived environmental impact. [...]

But after looking at the data on individual use of LLMs, I have stopped worrying about it and I think you should too.

The inevitable counter-argument to the idea that the impact of ChatGPT usage by an individual is negligible is that aggregate user demand is still the thing that drives these enormous investments in huge data centers and new energy sources to power them. Hannah acknowledges that:

I am not saying that AI energy demand, on aggregate, is not a problem. It is, even if it’s “just” of a similar magnitude to the other sectors that we need to electrify, such as cars, heating, or parts of industry. It’s just that individuals querying chatbots is a relatively small part of AI's total energy consumption. That’s how both of these facts can be true at the same time.

Meanwhile Arthur Clune runs the numbers on the potential energy impact of some much more severe usage patterns.

Developers burning through $100 of tokens per day (not impossible given some of the LLM-heavy development patterns that are beginning to emerge) could end the year with the equivalent of a short haul flight or 600 mile car journey.

In the panopticon scenario where all 10 million security cameras in the UK analyze video through a vision LLM at one frame per second Arthur estimates we would need to duplicate the total usage of Birmingham, UK - the output of a 1GW nuclear plant.

Let's not build that panopticon!