I still don't fuck with ChatGPT, sorry
As explained in an email to my dad
It seems like everyone is using ChatGPT except for me.
The way I see it, technology makes my life wildly easy as it is. I can order groceries from my phone and access the world’s knowledge via search engine and DM someone I haven’t seen since pre-school and take selfies whenever I want. So, for the most part, I don’t need to make it any easier by outsourcing to new technology the steps I’m also naturally good at – learning and synthesizing and understanding things.
I know there are ways AI can (and does) help me. I’ve used Google’s AI Mode chatbot one time to figure out a complicated math problem. And yes, it was pretty remarkable, the speed with which it yielded an answer that at first seemed impossible for me to figure out. Still, you know what was already remarkable? Google Search itself.
Anyway, I’m home at my dad’s house for a couple days. My dad, like so many of you reading this, mentioned he likes using ChatGPT. My step-mom, the environmentalist in our household, asked if he knew about how much energy the chatbot uses.
A ChatGPT search uses 10x more energy than a Google search, according to Goldman Sachs.
My dad said he knew this, but he didn’t know why that was the case. So I Googled it, and it’s actually not so easy to find a clear answer outside of the AI-generated knowledge panel, now that Google has seemingly decimated its once-amazing search functionality in favor of its AI-generated results.
I spent 20 minutes writing the following email to my dad to answer the question via my human brain, rather than ChatGPT.
The email I sent my dad explaining why ChatGPT is bad for the environment <3
When you search something on Google, there is some AI involved to help with the manual scraping of every piece of public information on the internet. Google has always been really good at using small amounts of AI to supplement the search function.
But with a chatbot like ChatGPT, it doesn't yield search results (i.e. a list of websites or posts that will answer your query). It produces a synthesis of its own scraping of all of that publicly available information. It's the difference between me writing you a list of book titles and me synthesizing in my head and outlining the thematic overlap of this group of books.
If you Google "what is the best restaurant?" you'll find hundreds of articles from food media and blogs and Yelp reviews that will tell you those individuals' opinions. If you ask ChatGPT, it will comb ALL of those results and give you its own overview.
It is only able to do this through "training, or adjusting, billions of parameters through repeated computations that require immense processing power," as Penn State's Institute of Energy and the Environment explains.
"This process demands high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, consisting of thousands of GPUs and TPUs (tensor processing units, a specialized chip that improves the speed of machine learning tasks) along with CPUs, all running in parallel. Each training session can take weeks or months, consuming massive amounts of electricity."
As one expert put it in an interview with NPR, one ChatGPT search uses roughly the electricity level "as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes."
"So, you can imagine with millions of people using something like that every day, that adds up to a really large amount of electricity."
All of this AI technology runs on the power of data centers, many of which are now in Northern Virginia, NPR explains. By 2030, the Washington Post reports, these data centers will need basically the amount of energy to power 6 million homes.
In 2022, these AI data centers made up 3% of the total power in the US. By 2030, Goldman Sachs estimates this will reach 8% of the country's total power output.
This massive increase, driven by consumer love for the ease of using chatbots as search engines, will create more power demand, "the likes of which hasn't been seen in a generation," according to Goldman Sachs.
The main energy sources for all the above: fossil fuels like coal and gas, which are the main drivers of climate change.
Love you!!
Rach
P.S. It took me ~20 minutes to write this email. I used roughly the same amount of electricity as I would have by looking up the number of a restaurant and then calling the restaurant and then texting the reservation time. However, leaving on a light in a room we're not in for 20 minutes would be the same amount of energy as having asked ChatGPT.