There’s a growing concern that our increasing use of artificial intelligence is putting a strain on electricity grids around the world. More use of AI means companies like Google, OpenAI, and Meta are building more data centers stuffed with more servers gobbling up more power.

AI tools like ChatGPT are incredibly useful, but what impact do they have on the environment? As individuals, how much electricity are we consuming, and how much carbon are we generating by using these tools?

Hannah Ritchie, author of Not the End of the World, addresses this question in a post on her Substack Sustainability by the Numbers titled What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?

It’s worth reading the whole post just to see how she attacks the problem, but the short answer is that even when you include the amortized cost of training the LLM model underlying ChatGPT, the electricity used, and the carbon generated are very small and not worth stressing over. 

So you can go ahead and use ChatGPT and its cousins with a clear conscience.

One less thing to worry about.

On the other hand, as Zeynep Tufekci writes in The New York Times, none of this means you can trust what these chatbots say. Sometimes they lose their minds.

Thanks for reading.