@@ -136,6 +136,10 @@ Web search is an essential service. It helps you find information. 365-ish GWh a
Web search and...everything people use ChatGPT for. Which, as I find increasingly, and have moaned about in this post, is rubbish. Slop. Crap. Shit. Which is the more reasonable usage of energy? Bearing in mind, if ChatGPT didn't exist, that 226.8GWh would remain *unspent* and available *for everything else*.
And that is just ChatGPT dot com. It's not the rest of OpenAI's services, or the many other models out there, like Claude or Gemini. Let's assume that the major models have a declining scale of power, roughly correlating with their popularity in comparison to ChatGPT. So if ChatGPT is at 226.8, Gemini might be somewhere around 150, Claude at 100, Grok at 50. It doesn't look good, does it?
*At least* Deepseek claims to be able to do it a little more efficiently.
Electricity generates heat. Datacentres are cooled with water. A ChatGPT query consumed around [500ml of water](https://earth.org/environmental-impact-chatgpt/)(I will admit here, that earth.org is inherently going to be biased towards something like this, but it's a well sourced article itself). Do you need to drink 500ml of water to write a really bad poem, or passively introduce a dog? Are you...unable to do that yourself, powered by a cup of coffee and a bagel?
"The cup of coffee and a bagel cost water to make, too!" Yep. And you added 500ml to that.
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@@ -156,3 +160,4 @@ All of my emails, my posts, bash scripts, work, ideas, research, images, any of
If any of it is bad, low quality, poor in some way - unlike the newsletter author and Andy of Saor - I will be able to say, with confidence:
