ChatGPT's Environmental Impact Ignored By Climate Warriors

[Ptarmigan]

ChatGPT's Environmental Impact Ignored By Climate Warriors
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/chatgpts-environmental-impact-ignored-climate-warriors

Climate alarmists have waged war on energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining operations but have yet to denounce large language models (LLMs) like Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT that use 16 ounces of fresh water every time a user asks it a series of questions.

Microsoft revealed in its latest environmental report that its global water consumption surged 34% from 2021-22 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons), a massive increase versus the previous years primarily due to artificial intelligence research, according to AP News.

"It's fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI," including "its heavy investment in generative AI and partnership with OpenAI," said Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside who has been developing a new process to calculate the environmental impact of ChatGPT.

Ren's team calculates that ChatGPT consumes 16 ounces of water for every 5 to 50 queries or prompts from a user. He noted, "Most people are not aware of the resource usage underlying ChatGPT."

Silence from the climate alarmists. ChatGPT uses lots of water to power it.

"We will continue to monitor our emissions, accelerate progress while increasing our use of clean energy to power data centers, purchasing renewable energy, and other efforts to meet our sustainability goals of being carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030," it continued.

OpenAI stated that it has given "considerable thought" to its computing power: "We recognize training large models can be energy and water-intensive" and work to improve efficiencies.

Despite significant energy and freshwater usage, ChatGPT and other LLMs have not faced the same scrutiny from environmental warriors as crypto mining has over the years.

[DefiantSix]

 That's okay; they were silent as church mice when NSA was building it's resource hog server farm here in Utah County a few years back, as well. I guess they didn't realize that all the power plants in this part of the country are COAL-FIRED, that there are many nesting pairs of bald eagles all up and down the Ochre Mountains - where they have their wind turbine "back-up" generators, and that neither Utah Lake nor the Jordan River are all that big as water sources to keep the place from cooking itself go.

I think I'm spotting a "we're only against it if the resource use puts money in anyone's pockets but the government's" pattern here...