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)
> 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.
True, but with autonomous agents hitting 2,000 requests is a lot easier.
AFIACT, if I make a single request, the part that uses the most power is my monitors while they display the result and I read/use it.
Which makes me suspect that if I do something complex involving 2,000 requests, the power used is less than I'd use to achieve the same goal using my monitors and other office equipment. That depends on the goal of the complex action, of course.
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.
why not both? some perspective:
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 waymaybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:
env impact is something worth considering regardless of industryI 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 :)
Where did you get those stats from? Curious.
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)
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?
A costs less than B so we should do A is hardly a moral argument.
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.
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?
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.
Why not treat both as bad instead of pointing to whataboutism to make a point?
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
and what benefit does a golf course have to anyone? Unlike golf courses, AI summary is used by pretty much everyone. And if you dont think this is true, then you live in a bubble.
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.
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.
We didn't get to where we are as a species without it.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
I also had this sudden realization a year ago about the cruelty of animal usage in society and went vegan and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.
One other angle is there are the beginnings of consideration of cruelty to AI's. That's great that people are starting to consider it, to try to be compassionate out of the abundance of caution that it might matter.
But to then just straight up pay to have tens to hundreds of obviously sentient animal killed for you per year (and yes egg laying hens and dairy cows are killed in their youth, when they don't want to die) seems like a blind spot a lot of people have. I had it myself until recently, so I don't cast any judgment, but I also wish it was easier to make people just see the truth on this
It's not an or/or is it.
Source?
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...
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?
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.
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.
Could as well stop breathing to make way for the Super Intellect, that's what every sane transhumanist must do!
Giving up AI would be much easier and less disruptive.
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".
Giving up private jets and cruises would be less disruptive than giving up AI.
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.
Are you also killing the cow like your ancestors did or are you letting some poorly paid immigrant do that for you?
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?