the comment " be aware that talking to LLM actually moves carbon from earth into atmosphere" having 39 likes is ABSURD to me.

out of all the fascinating and awful things to care about with the advent of ai people pick co2 emissions? really? like really?

Of course it’s a reasonable thing to bring up. Resources are finite.

I know people who can no longer afford to heat their homes thanks to electricity going up so much (and who also went all-electric because of the push to that to reduce climate change). Before anyone says “solar”, solar isn’t very helpful in cold winter weather, nor is it at night, and before you say “storage”, it doesn’t help when it’s below -10 C out and modern heat pumps need to switch to resistive heat. My home needs 69A for 3-4 hours at night to stay heated when the temps are below -20 C. 66kWh of space is out of my reach and I’d have no way to recharge it anyway.

So, yes, consuming electricity wastefully has very real consequences for very real people. They simply get to be frozen (or will get to be overheated, once summer gets here). They don’t have access to private debt to pay their electric bill nor to install “sustainable” power generation.

As far as climate change being real… one of the aforementioned people just burns wood in a stove now since he can’t afford his electric. So that’s the actual impact of a pointless chatbot making stop quality PRs. Is that really the right direction?

No one is counting CO2 emissions. It's a quick understandable shorthand for pointing out that AI uses a lot of resources, from manufacturing the hardware to electricity use. It's a valid criticism considering how little value these bots actually contribute.

> out of all the fascinating and awful things to care about with the advent of ai people pick co2 emissions? really? like really?

Yes. Because climate change is real. If you don't believe that then let your LLM of choice explain it to you.