Raw LLM Responses

There’s an absolutely tremendous cost in terms of data centers and climate impacts to support all these queries. There are literally data centers that have their own polluting gas plants to have enough power to run. Even if all the plants ran on solar it’s still a tremendous amount of physical extractive resources. It’s understandable to me that there have to be greater limits to access. I don’t think OpenAI or other AI companies truly have an interest in climate or sustainability but they certainly have a profit motive. I run maybe about twenty queries a month so my own impact is a drop in a drop in a drop in the bucket, and I haven’t ever paid for ChatGPT. Doesn’t mean I can get up on a high horse here, I’m still contributing to our global resource drain. I do see a number of reasons why we’d want to limit queries though. Of course it inevitably goes towards the rich and powerful having the most access as with all things.