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Those are incredible stats. As a vegan who uses LLMs at work frequently, I would love to have the source as well :)


  - https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environmental-standard-for-ai
  - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201677/greenhouse-gas-emissions-of-major-food-products/
  - https://www.statista.com/chart/9483/how-thirsty-is-our-food/
  - https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
  - https://x.com/sama/status/1890820962993533232
You got to do the calculations yourself though.


Wow, thanks. I’m even coming up with 500K chatGPT queries for the amount of energy consumed as a KG of beef, though I might have moved a decimal place somewhere - feel free to check my math :)

“average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours of energy” - or 0.00034MWH

Using this calculator: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... - in my zip, 0.0002KG of CO2 per MWH. (Though, I suppose it depends more on the zip where they’re doing inference, however this translation didn’t seem to vary much when I tried other zips)

Then, 99.48KG/0.0002KG= 497,400 chatGPT queries worth of CO2 per KG of beef?

Thanks for sharing!


`0.00034MWH`should probably be kilo not mega, but I think you still did it correctly :D

I think I used Btu (thermal units) in my calculation, so I only calculated actual energy expenditure for my 60.000 queries result.

But you are right, a better metric might be to use CO2-equivalent, because cows emit a lot of methane, whereas chatbots don't.

99.48KG / 0.228kg/kq = 436,315 queries per kg of beef.

Yup checks out!


This is a good article on the subject:

> Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...

He’s done some good followup articles as well:

https://andymasley.substack.com/s/ai-and-the-environment




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