I wonder how much co2 is being thrown into the atmosphere everyday through the steady stream of “look what I made this LLM do” and endless “benchmarking”?

Sigh

One useful hint here is the API token cost - in this case "about $74 in API tokens" for Opus 5.5.

We know Anthropic run inference at a margin, so that $74 means that the cost of the electricity involved is substantially less than $74. I'd love to know the actual cost there.

Approximately nothing - the carbon cost of electricity is already very low, and most of the inference costs are GPU and datacenter amortization. You could require all AI inference to be carbon-neutral and that'd barely raise the API prices.

I wonder how much co2 you use to get through the day, and how much you use to remark on other people's creations in a way that suggests you disapprove of their utilization of their available resources. How much co2 do your projects emit, since you seem to be interested in those metrics?

Intuitively I'd say that just-for-fun AI projects emit orders of magnitude less CO2 than what just-for-fun road trips or air travel emit.

So unless you can show that it approaches all the other frivolous consumption that humans love to waste resources on, maybe we can get back to experimenting with cool technology and talking about it, on this website called "Hacker News"?