alt Hacker NewsThe environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.
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toasty228 • last Monday at 6:58 PM
It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel...
80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
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lxgr • last Monday at 7:03 PM
That might be true, but at least I started asking way more questions since we’ve had competent LLMs.
That's true, and I am not anti-AI. I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens.
Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative.
But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable.
By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wanted to offer a broader critique and create an analogy, not just talk about energy usage on its own.
What I had in mind was: it's easier to go many places that are a mile or less from me, by car. Because everything is obstructed by cars. And I'm atrophied by lack of movement. Best would be to drive somewhere to move/walk.
People already do that in masses.
And doing shopping by car, because everything else seems unbearable, also takes away your time, apart from wasting energy compared to more, smaller shops that would be reachable by foot, bycicle etc.
I guess you know the argument.
Today, people's thinking atrophies because their LLM is probably right in their summarization of some Wikipedia article, plus 2-3 other random sources.
Or so.
Using the Wikipedia search function is not expensive.
But, I mostly had a bigger picture in mind than what is the cost of inference.