@danjones000 @Matt_Noyes electricity is only about 1/3 of global emissions. All data centers, including AI datacenters, are only 1% of electricity usage. That makes 0.3% of total emissions.

Much more emissions are due to cars, meat, cement production and rice cultivation.

I recognize that AI has a lot of electricity use; it is nothing compared to the other things you do with your time.

@danjones000 @Matt_Noyes It does not hurt to try to reduce those emissions; reducing any emissions is good.

But claiming that AI is solely responsible for climate change is intellectually dishonest.

There are plenty of other problems with AI; "burning up the planet" is not a convincing one.

@Matt_Noyes @danjones000 I don't think climate change is a fair last resort when questioning someone's use of LLMs. There are plenty of other reasons not to use them.

@evan I don't think anyone in this thread used it as a "last resort" to question the use of LLMs. @Matt_Noyes brought it up as a legitimate problem. Nobody has said that it's the only problem. Nobody said that LLMs are there worst cause of climate change.

But when it was brought up as a problem, you dismissed it very casually because an individual's use of LLMs doesn't contribute much to the problem. When I brought up that an individual's use is not the actual problem because it takes a bunch of individuals to drive the demand that causes the problem (evidenced by the exponentially increasing demand for electricity-hungry data centers), you knocked down a bunch of strawmen.

That was intellectually dishonest.