There's been a lot of press about Large Language Models (LLMs), such as those behind ChatGPT, using vast amounts of energy per query. In fact, however, a person doing the same work emits 12x to 45x more carbon from their laptop alone.

Today’s "Five-Minute Friday" episode is a quick one on how “The Carbon Emissions of Writing and Illustrating Are Lower for AI than for Humans”. Everything in today’s episode is based on an ArXiV preprint paper with that title by researchers from UC Irvine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities.

For writing a page of text, for example, the authors estimate:
• BLOOM open-source LLM (including training) produces ~1.6g CO2/query.
• OpenAI's GPT-3 (including training) produces ~2.2g CO2/query.
• Laptop usage for 0.8 hours (average time to write page) emits ~27g CO2 (that's 12x GPT-3).
• Desktop for same amount of writing time emits ~72g CO2 (32 x GPT-3).

For creating a digital illustration:
• Midjourney (including training) produces ~1.9g CO2/query.
• DALL-E 2 produces ~2.2g CO2/query.
• Human takes ~3.2 hours for the same work, emitting ~100g CO2 (45 x DALL-E 2) on a laptop or ~280g CO2 (127 x DALL-E 2) on a desktop.

There are complexities here, such as what humans do with their time instead of writing or illustrating; if it’s spent driving, for example, then the net impact would be worse. As someone who’d love to see the world at net negative carbon emissions ASAP through innovations like nuclear fusion and carbon capture, however, I have been getting antsy about how much energy state-of-the-art LLMs use, but this simple article turned that perspective upside down. I’ll continue to use A.I. to augment my work wherever I can... and hopefully get my day done earlier so I can get away from my machine and enjoy some time outdoors.

Hear more detail in today's episode or check out the video version to see figures as well.

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