YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden

90 points jlundberg 1 hour ago 81 comments

jlundberg 1 hour ago | parent

Based on a newly released model for calculating this that is open sourced.

armcat 1 hour ago | parent

Great writeup! I've done some work on Codecarbon [1] in the past, it's a pretty standard tool for measuring ML/AI workload emissions, it would be awesome to have your findings contributed to that project as well.

[1] https://github.com/mlco2/codecarbon

reedf1 1 hour ago | parent

We can pretend that international trade and energy price arbitrage doesn't exist to make us feel nice and happy; but the reality is a Watt spent in Sweden increases the marginal cost of energy by the same amount as a Watt spent in Texas. These things are tied together by foreign exchange, imported energy intensive goods, petroleum products and directly imported power. It's time we stop being naive about total energy use.

seanmcdirmid 1 hour ago | parent

Sweden is not grid connected to Texas, well, nor is also any other grid in the USA actually. Smelting was placed near cheap hydro resources (and why Boeing built planes in Seattle) for good reasons. Just replace cheap watts with clean watts.

reedf1 1 hour ago | parent

Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed. Which means a "clean" Watt spent on inference is taking away a "clean" Watt that would have been spent on heating or steel. Which means Sweden needs to buy energy or energy intensive goods on the global market, which raises prices, which means Texas is being paid.

p1necone 59 minutes ago | parent

> "Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed"

This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?

They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.

reedf1 52 minutes ago | parent

> this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.

My opinion that reality should take precedent over feel good lies?

tormeh 43 minutes ago | parent

There's only so much hydro power to build out, and nuclear takes forever. Solar only works in summer that far north, and without insane batteries wind power just becomes greenwashed natgas.

JumpCrisscross 57 minutes ago | parent

> Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed

By what?

You're treating electricity as a globally-tradable good. It's not.

reedf1 54 minutes ago | parent

It is.

p_l 50 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps they are mistaking Sweden with Norway (whose nearly 100% hydropower system is constrained)

leonidasrup 41 minutes ago | parent

Most of electricity in Sweden is produced by:

1. Hydropower 40%

2. Nuclear 27%

3. Wind 22%

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/sweden#what-source...

shiandow 1 hour ago | parent

I'm a bit confused. For one I am not sure why this must hold for something as difficult to transfer as energy, and I am not sure why it matters. Not all energy is the same, hence the title.

IshKebab 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah I don't understand why these new data centres are all in populated areas. AI isn't latency sensitive. Put them in some remote location surely?

JumpCrisscross 58 minutes ago | parent

> don't understand why these new data centres are all in populated areas

Power connections.

fleebee 42 minutes ago | parent

One of the reasons to build them near populated areas is that it makes it easier to repurpose waste heat to, for example, heat houses in colder climates.

bjourne 1 minute ago | parent

Last I checked waste heat isn't energy dense enough for large-scale district heating. Small pilot projects yes, but it won't heat whole towns.

LtWorf 30 minutes ago | parent

They need drinking water apparently.

jonathanstrange 13 minutes ago | parent

Probably so they have no problems getting people who work there and provide technical services. I mean that seriously without any sarcasm or tongue-in-cheek, it seems the most likely explanation to me.

km3r 59 minutes ago | parent

This is why people in left wing areas need to oppose datacenters bans. Regulate them. Require green energy investments that more than offset their load. Use some of that flowing AI money for the betterment of society.

croes 57 minutes ago | parent

Less waste of resources is still waste of resources.

How much of the AI generated content is actually useful, how much useless, how much harmful?

YetAnotherNick 54 minutes ago | parent

Datacenter wouldn't stop, and there would be some country or area which allows it. Unless they regulate the entire world, we should focus on lowering CO2 globally, and that means allowing datacenter in your neighour if your energy is better.

km3r 10 minutes ago | parent

Except you don't actually ban it, you just move it to texas.

That content is coming either way.

And if you require them to over offset their load to the grid, it's literally fossil fuels burned over all.

leonidasrup 46 minutes ago | parent

You don't need to specifically regulate green investments for datacenter. Just introduce CO2 emission tax and the industry will find efficient ways to reduce CO2 emissions.

skeledrew 25 minutes ago | parent

Or efficient ways around those regulations.

spuz 6 minutes ago | parent

I think "people in left wing areas" is weird phrasing. There is nothing inherent about an area that makes it left or right wing. "People who live under governments who are responsive to collective issues such as climate and energy prices" would make more sense.

bob1029 57 minutes ago | parent

The reasoning effort knob is becoming a really important variable regarding how much impact AI models will have on energy consumption. Medium and max can differ by as much as two orders of magnitude in their token consumption. We also have to consider the amplification of compute demand that occurs by way of the tool calls themselves. Tokens are mostly a constant cost thing, but how they are interpreted can mean the difference between a 5 minute cpu bound operation and a 50uS cached database lookup. At some point, the CPU is going to become the bottleneck again.

alpineman 50 minutes ago | parent

And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.

Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)

Gigachad 47 minutes ago | parent

Giving up AI would be much easier and less disruptive.

schleck8 45 minutes ago | parent

Most people in the West eat too much meat. Red meat in particular is a group 2 carcinogen according to the WHO, so the body isn't meant to consume a lot of it. Yet many people eat meat every day, because "It's not a complete meal without it" or "I somehow need 10 times more protein than people a millenium ago while claiming to eat like them".

deaux 18 minutes ago | parent

Giving up private jets and cruises would be less disruptive than giving up AI.

schleck8 47 minutes ago | parent

I've seen people who hate AI instantly become defensive as soon as someone brings up the water usage for a kg of beef. It's selective outrage.

I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.

consp 45 minutes ago | parent

Why not treat both as bad instead of pointing to whataboutism to make a point?

schleck8 37 minutes ago | parent

Because some causes are significantly worse than others. If you want to have a big impact, you start with the big levers.

I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.

How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?

stuaxo 29 minutes ago | parent

AI data centres are a thing we are choosing to add, we could just not do that.

What benefit is the AI summary on search giving me Vs the actual search for a start.

deaux 19 minutes ago | parent

Eating more meat is a thing we are choosing to add, we could just not do that.

Flying more is a thing we are choosing to do, we could just not do that.

busssard 17 minutes ago | parent

what benefit is it giving to the search engine is what you have to ask.

if you dont leave the page they get more ad-money

alpineman 13 minutes ago | parent

Have a look at a graph of meat consumption in the US. We are also adding to that. That's my point, we don't need to add to meat consumption, we can make reductions.

King-Aaron 17 minutes ago | parent

The meat industry helps keep humans alive however, whereas the AI industry does not. I think the argument between the two needs to factor in the actual reason for the emissions.

Eating meat is ecologically unsustainable but it has an actual reason for it to exist.

alpineman 14 minutes ago | parent

Eating meat is not necessary by any means to 'be alive' in fact many studies show that a plant based diet is better for longevity. So, in the same way that AI is not 'necessary' to do a job, it's not necessary to eat meat. It's a matter of taste and societal conformity/norms.

wartywhoa23 43 minutes ago | parent

Could as well stop breathing to make way for the Super Intellect, that's what every sane transhumanist must do!

thesdev 40 minutes ago | parent

Source?

reticulates 35 minutes ago | parent

The relative resource consumption of meat vs. plants is well established. Chicken is much more resource efficient than beef if you want to eat meat but consume less resources, and mussels are even more efficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_anima...

thesdev 32 minutes ago | parent

That part I'm well aware of, I wanna know how the parent reached the figure 17000. What does count as a request even nowadays? When I tell an agent to make the button blue, how many requests is that? And how about when I tell it to throw together a whole website? Or rewrite the codebase in Rust?

reticulates 23 minutes ago | parent

Presumably based on the numbers in the article?

“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”

0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.

pseudony 38 minutes ago | parent

I think that is a bit out of the blue. But it is fun to imagine a billboard-sized app for a referendum on burgers or AI.

That will put some sweat on some brows :)

CalRobert 35 minutes ago | parent

True, but with autonomous agents hitting 2,000 requests is a lot easier.

vlyan 26 minutes ago | parent

I want you to imagine someone like Jenovah's Witnesses trying to moralize people on the Internet. how successful do you estimate such effort might be?

spuz 11 minutes ago | parent

A costs less than B so we should do A is hardly a moral argument.

soco 16 minutes ago | parent

It's not an or/or is it.

lawn 15 minutes ago | parent

Your comparison only makes sense if you also consider how many requests are being made.

The "only the biggest thing matters" is a faulty logic. If you truly care about the environment then we need to improve things across the board.

And moralizing about living beings doesn't help your cause here.

alpineman 4 minutes ago | parent

It might not help the cause, but ultimately it's an uncomfortable truth. It's easy to dismiss a fact as 'moralising'.

It's simply a fact that animals suffer when they are factory farmed and then killed. It's a fact that they are living sentient beings. You can be totally okay with that, but the reality is that most people are only okay with it because it doesn't happen right in front of them.

I used to eat meat, btw. And I also used to attack people for 'moralising'. I now realise this was my brain trying to defend itself; to make sense why I would pet a dog but eat a pig.

uludag 12 minutes ago | parent

That's actually kind of a scary statistic... I probably eat a burgur at most every month (beef maybe once a week at most) but probably make more than 2000 requests a day.

Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.

achille 12 minutes ago | parent

why not both? some perspective:

  0.5 Pwh/yr - worldwide data center energy
  4-5 PWh/yr - meat total farm to table
  166 PWh/yr - worldwide total energy production
the true bottleneck and cost we have is energy, carbon is a polite proxy if you can meaningfully cut down the energetic cost, that's very valuable either way

maybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:

  DC #1: EU Efficient, but has ~100ms additional latency
  DC #2: TX Runs on jet engine turbines, neighbors complain of noise and air pollution
env impact is something worth considering regardless of industry

wartywhoa23 48 minutes ago | parent

Worry not, AI people! Greenhouse gas exemptions will be made for the future of work, maths and art, the salvation of the humankind, the genie that is out of the bottle, etc, if only at the expense of taxing your and your dog's fart.

vlyan 41 minutes ago | parent

it's remarkable how it only took one week of "AI bad for math" headlines for snarky redditors to incorporate it into their collective conscience.

wartywhoa23 37 minutes ago | parent

These snarky redditors, their go-to way of making an argument by picking at a single word in the whole sentence checks out every time!

syshyk 16 minutes ago | parent

This assumes people did not already have these thoughts/ideas ?

blfr 42 minutes ago | parent

The comments section reminds me of The Dead Great-Grandfather Test

[Science fiction writer Bruce] Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.

Sterling's rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it's something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it's a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.

But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there's a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.

https://ribbonfarm.com/2011/12/08/acting-dead-trading-up-and...

reedf1 38 minutes ago | parent

It's funny because this comment reminds me of something else... cope.

vasco 37 minutes ago | parent

You can apply the same to FIRE if you want to trigger half this board.

deaux 20 minutes ago | parent

Good that he didn't or the comment would be long [dead]!

streetfighter64 32 minutes ago | parent

Basically "Don't live beyond our collective means" = "Die".

Are you buying the latest iPhone every year? If not, you might as well be dead.

I wish people would realize that life is not about stuff. Living within your means, being frugal and focusing on what really matters (time with family, experiencing nature, thinking interesting thoughts) is not at all "permanent existential hibernation".

I resent the "The Dead Great-Grandfather Test" and similar "growth"-at-all-costs ideologies. Its implications are disgusting.

rob74 22 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, the average Swede emitted 3.43 tons of CO2 in 2023, which is less than a quarter of what an average US citizen emitted. Does that mean that a US citizen is four times more "alive" than a Swede?

vasco 18 minutes ago | parent

Yes exactly what's the problem with profiting from child slavery if I only do it every 3 or 4 years? Pfff, get good guys.

locallost 24 minutes ago | parent

This is a fallacy. People 100 years like your great grandfather ago solved problems they had 100 years ago. People today solve problems they have today.

blfr 21 minutes ago | parent

This is about a dead grandfather as he is decomposing in the ground. Not about his life which might have been more energy-intensive than that of many moderns.

rob74 16 minutes ago | parent

Not sure about your great-grandfather, but mine didn't own a car, didn't travel on vacation by airplane, and, while he may have used a stove to heat his house, he probably only used it sparingly, because coal was expensive. So I doubt his life was more energy-intensive than mine.

blfr 7 minutes ago | parent

Mine drove a gas-guzzling GMC CCKW 353 truck, putting out up to a kilogram of CO2 per 1 km on inefficiently planned (but scenic) routes.

ant6n 19 minutes ago | parent

Is this some sort of straw man against trying to stay within your CO2 Budget? I really don’t understand the aim of this comment.

muvlon 15 minutes ago | parent

It's a really dumb test. You can apply it to argue against reducing or stopping literally anything. My dead great grandfather uses no fentanyl and commits no murders. If we're not doing those, we're as good as dead!

matsemann 17 minutes ago | parent

What a shitty way to dismiss anyone with any concerns whatsoever.

skeledrew 34 minutes ago | parent

Is this site getting a death hug? I got a 502, then 503, then incomplete page load.

arjie 27 minutes ago | parent

Site is HTTP 503. It does make sense that an nginx 503 would cost much less to serve.

mkgiga 19 minutes ago | parent

too many things can happen in the ai provider's backend which won't be observable from the outside. for starters how will you even know what hardware and inference backend is being used by RandomAiProvider3284.com? you can't. i looked at your berget-ai/co2-calculator repo and you're expected to provide this yourself. it also uses "measuredResponseTimeSeconds" as a metric even though it's impossible to know how much of that time was spent rate limiting the user during hours of high activity

kleiba2 11 minutes ago | parent

> for starters how will you even know what hardware and inference backend is being used by RandomAiProvider3284.com? you can't.

From the article:

A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.

-> So the comparison is based on the assumption that identical hardware is used.

Also from the article:

Emissions estimates are based on the current average emissions intensity of each regional electricity grid, which has been the norm in greenhouse gas accounting.

mepiethree 15 minutes ago | parent

This is true of ~everything that uses electricity, not just AI https://app.electricitymaps.com

looofooo0 10 minutes ago | parent

same for Germany which has roughly the same Co2 per kwh.