this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I. | How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy? (www.newyorker.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sure, and I think that these may even be useful and it warrants the cost. But it is to just say that this still isn’t simply running a couple light bulbs or something. This is a major draw on the grid (but likely still pales in comparison to crypto farms).

Note that most people would be better off using a model that’s trained for a specific task. For example, training image recognition uses vastly less energy because the models are vastly smaller, but they’re exceedingly excellent at image recognition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

The article claims 200M ChatGPT requests per day. Assuming they make a new version yearly, that's 73B requests per training. Spreading 1000MW across 73B requests yields a per-request amortized cost of 0.01 watt. It's nothing.

47 more households-worth of electricity just isn't a major draw on anything. We add ~500,000 households a year from natural growth.