Remix.run Logo
▲ alpineman 2 hours ago

And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.

Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)

▲Gareth321 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.

And China is building 6-8 new mega-scale lignite coal power plants *per month.* Each one of those power plants emits more CO2 than 8.3 million people consuming medium amounts of animal products *for life.*

For the record I'm not denigrating your point. I'm taking it a step further. We're not focusing on the major contributors of CO2 emissions. It's not data centers and it's not meat consumption.

▲CalRobert an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

True, but with autonomous agents hitting 2,000 requests is a lot easier.

▲uludag an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's actually kind of a scary statistic... I probably eat a burgur at most every month (beef maybe once a week at most) but probably make more than 2000 requests a day.

Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.

▲achille an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

why not both? some perspective:

  0.5 Pwh/yr - worldwide data center energy
  4-5 PWh/yr - meat total farm to table
  166 PWh/yr - worldwide total energy production
the true bottleneck and cost we have is energy, carbon is a polite proxy if you can meaningfully cut down the energetic cost, that's very valuable either way

maybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:

  DC #1: EU Efficient, but has ~100ms additional latency
  DC #2: TX Runs on jet engine turbines, neighbors complain of noise and air pollution
env impact is something worth considering regardless of industry
▲pseudony an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that is a bit out of the blue. But it is fun to imagine a billboard-sized app for a referendum on burgers or AI.

That will put some sweat on some brows :)

▲EdwardDiego 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Where did you get those stats from? Curious.

▲alpineman 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

A single burger (108g) results in emissions of 3-6kg of Co2 across its lifecycle

One AI request is 0.38 g in Sweden and 3.2 g in Texas

(Tofu is about 0.1 to 0.3kg of Co2, Seitan about 0.1kg of Co2 per equivalent 100g)

▲vlyan an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I want you to imagine someone like Jenovah's Witnesses trying to moralize people on the Internet. how successful do you estimate such effort might be?

▲ an hour ago | parent | next [-]
[deleted]
▲spuz an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

A costs less than B so we should do A is hardly a moral argument.

▲vlyan an hour ago | parent [-]

and life of subsistence farming in the countryside costs two orders of magnitude less of carbon sin that life in the city, where everything the enlightened cosmopolitan consumes is delivered by carbon-chugging trucks, freighters, and planes from hundreds and thousands miles away.

but the line is clearly drawn at performative sacrifice, not substantial.

▲alpineman 20 minutes ago | parent [-]

Livestock is 14.5% of global emissions. Food is about 1/3rd of each individual's emissions. A plant based diet can cut that by 50-75%. How is that not substantial?

▲schleck8 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've seen people who hate AI instantly become defensive as soon as someone brings up the water usage for a kg of beef. It's selective outrage.

I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.

▲consp 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why not treat both as bad instead of pointing to whataboutism to make a point?

▲schleck8 an hour ago | parent [-]

Because some causes are significantly worse than others. If you want to have a big impact, you start with the big levers.

I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.

How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?

▲stuaxo an hour ago | parent [-]

AI data centres are a thing we are choosing to add, we could just not do that.

What benefit is the AI summary on search giving me Vs the actual search for a start.

▲alpineman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Have a look at a graph of meat consumption in the US. We are also adding to that. That's my point, we don't need to add to meat consumption, we can make reductions.

▲busssard an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

what benefit is it giving to the search engine is what you have to ask.

if you dont leave the page they get more ad-money

▲deaux an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Eating more meat is a thing we are choosing to add, we could just not do that.

Flying more is a thing we are choosing to do, we could just not do that.

▲King-Aaron an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The meat industry helps keep humans alive however, whereas the AI industry does not. I think the argument between the two needs to factor in the actual reason for the emissions.

Eating meat is ecologically unsustainable but it has an actual reason for it to exist.

▲alpineman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Eating meat is not necessary by any means to 'be alive' in fact many studies show that a plant based diet is better for longevity. So, in the same way that AI is not 'necessary' to do a job, it's not necessary to eat meat. It's a matter of taste and societal conformity/norms.

▲King-Aaron an hour ago | parent [-]

We didn't get to where we are as a species without it.

▲alpineman 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

We didn't get to where we are as a species without violently killing each other, or forcing people do to work for us, or killing our young, etc. Doesn't mean we should keep doing it.

▲solyin 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Friends have described scenarios where ai has literally saved their life. Like, they were trying to commit suicide, they had no one human to talk to, but they did have AI.

▲lawn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your comparison only makes sense if you also consider how many requests are being made.

The "only the biggest thing matters" is a faulty logic. If you truly care about the environment then we need to improve things across the board.

And moralizing about living beings doesn't help your cause here.

▲alpineman an hour ago | parent [-]

It might not help the cause, but ultimately it's an uncomfortable truth. It's easy to dismiss a fact as 'moralising'.

It's simply a fact that animals suffer when they are factory farmed and then killed. It's a fact that they are living sentient beings. You can be totally okay with that, but the reality is that most people are only okay with it because it doesn't happen right in front of them.

I used to eat meat, btw. And I also used to attack people for 'moralising'. I now realise this was my brain trying to defend itself; to try to make sense of why I would pet a dog but eat a pig (everyone else is doing it, this person is just different and wrong, go away bad vegan person!)

▲soco an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not an or/or is it.

▲thesdev 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Source?

▲reticulates an hour ago | parent [-]

The relative resource consumption of meat vs. plants is well established. Chicken is much more resource efficient than beef if you want to eat meat but consume less resources, and mussels are even more efficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_anima...

▲thesdev an hour ago | parent [-]

That part I'm well aware of, I wanna know how the parent reached the figure 17000. What does count as a request even nowadays? When I tell an agent to make the button blue, how many requests is that? And how about when I tell it to throw together a whole website? Or rewrite the codebase in Rust?

▲reticulates an hour ago | parent [-]

Presumably based on the numbers in the article?

“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”

0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.

▲thesdev an hour ago | parent [-]

Thanks. My next question would be what's a typical request. The article defines it as "production-typical request of 5,000 input and 387 output tokens, weighted by a typical day's traffic" for the Kimi K3 model. Not sure how that translates to my scale of the blue button to RIIR.

▲wartywhoa23 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could as well stop breathing to make way for the Super Intellect, that's what every sane transhumanist must do!

▲Gigachad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Giving up AI would be much easier and less disruptive.

▲schleck8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most people in the West eat too much meat. Red meat in particular is a group 2 carcinogen according to the WHO, so the body isn't meant to consume a lot of it. Yet many people eat meat every day, because "It's not a complete meal without it" or "I somehow need 10 times more protein than people a millenium ago while claiming to eat like them".

▲deaux an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Giving up private jets and cruises would be less disruptive than giving up AI.

▲ 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
▲shoobiedoo 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Tell you what, I'll keep eating beef, walking to work, and not using AI. Closer to how our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years, so it can't be too off the mark.

▲alpineman 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

Are you also killing the cow like your ancestors did or are you letting some poorly paid immigrant do that for you?

▲shoobiedoo 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

I trap and kill hare, and make cheese from fresh milk from my friend's dairy farm. But no, I do not kill the cows that I eat.

What do immigrants have to do with this? I shared my opinion that living like our ancestors did is the way I'd like to continue my life. If you have a counter opinion, can you offer it?