A profound relational revolution is underway, not orchestrated by tech developers but driven by users themselves. Many of the 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT are seeking more than just assistance with emails or information on food safety; they are looking for emotional support.
“Therapy and companionship” have emerged as two of the most frequent applications for generative AI globally, according to the Harvard Business Review. This trend marks a significant, unplanned pivot in how people interact with technology.
Granted, but it still will suck a fuck ton of coal produced electricity.
One chat request to an LLM produces about as much CO2 as burning one droplet of gasoline (if it was from coal fired power, less if it comes from cleaner sources). It makes far less CO2 to talk to a chatbot for hours upon hours than a ten minute drive to see a therapist once a week.
Sorry, you’re right. I meant the training of the LLM is what uses lots of energy, I guess that’s not end user’s fault.
@MrLLM @Womble
Question … did someone once do a study comparing a regular fulltext indexed based search vs ai in terms of energy consumption ;)
Second … if people would keep using “old” tech -> wouldn’t that be better for employment of people and therefor for social stability on this planet ?
To your first question, nop, I have no idea how much energy takes to index the web in a traditional way (e.g MapReduce). But I think, in recent years, it’s been pretty clear that training AI consumes more energy (so much that big corpo are investing in nuclear energy, I think there was an article about companies giving up meeting 2030 [or 2050?] carbon emission goals, couldn’t find it)
About the second… I agree with you, but I also think that the problem is much bigger and complex than that.