I’m shocked, is it really this small? I’ve had some trouble finding a source for this number.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/

> Mea Culpa! I have said a few times “$40 billion” is the total amount of AI revenue in 2025, and I need to correct the record. $35 billion is what hyperscalers will make this year (roughly), and when you include OpenAI, Anthropic and other startups, the amount is around $55 billion. If you include neoclouds, this number increases by about $6.1 billion. In any case, this doesn’t dramatically change my thesis.

> "I’m going to use a bunch of numbers here that I believe to be directionally correct,"

> "Let’s start with total datacenter spend for 2025. Insiders think it’s going to clock in at around $400 billion."

(in the US? worldwide?)

> "I am sure I’m off by a few percent in these categories, but I’m relying on AI and we all know it’s still imperfect."

> "the AI datacenters to be built in 2025 will suffer $40 billion of annual depreciation, while generating somewhere between $15 and $20 billion of revenue."

In a follow-up article [2], the author says that he learned that the investments probably have much less than the 10 years of depreciation time he originally assumed. Again, no external sources are linked.

> "Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies "

So, it seems the author estimated how much money will be invested in AI datacenters in 2025. The 20 billion of annual revenue mentioned in the article are just the share of all AI revenue for these new data centers. And these numbers have just been estimated by the author - apparently with the help of AI.

While the article and the blog posts may have some merit, it seems all based on some guy's assumptions and conversations he claims to have had.

[1] https://pracap.com/global-crossing-reborn/

[2] https://pracap.com/an-ai-addendum/

It's a reblogging site that's frequently wrong about both facts and details.

Slop

>The DMA should be repealed while a more appropriate fit for purpose legislative instrument is put in place... Despite our concerns with the DMA, teams across Apple are spending thousands of hours to bring new features to the European Union while meeting the law’s requirements. But it’s become clear that we can’t solve every problem the DMA creates.

The headline could just have easily said "Apple Requests" or "Apple Suggests".

I doubt it would make waves if Apple expressed the same opinion about some US legislation. Is Apple allowed to have an opinion about legislation in other countries where it operates?

Laws like the DMA were specifically made to fight the influence of mega corporations like Apple. For them to use language like "it should be repealed" instead of "it should be changed" shows their intent.

I support the EU's right to shape their digital environment. But if you're being threatened with fines on the order of $38 billion which are levied based on vague, ever-changing rules, then of course you will want that situation to go away while the law gets fixed.

On the other hand, cynically speaking, maybe "fighting Apple's influence" through arbitrary fines is actually the point.

My understanding is that Apple's proposed approach to CSAM prevention (which was subsequently abandoned) made significantly greater attempts to protect user privacy compared with the current EU chat control proposal.

Why lie about stuff that's so easy to check?

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-csam-scanning-heat-initiat...

I expect there are many other falsehoods of yours in this thread, but I'm not going to try to identify all of them. I just want to know: What motivates you to make claims which can be refuted with a 30-second Google search?

For example, at the gym I go to they do have a card reader as an alternative to checking in with the app, but at one point it was not working, which meant a smartphone was mandatory to go to the gym. And it was left that way for months; fixing it was clearly not a priority because the expectation of society is that everyone has a smartphone (you'll be met with surprise if you tell people you don't have their app installed, and incredulity at the idea that someone might not have a smartphone). And outside my workplace they put up car charging stations that have no way to pay for charging without an app.

And then (at least here in Sweden) there are increasingly places that accept no payment methods other than mobile payments (Swish here in Sweden), and online services like healthcare services requiring you to authenticate with BankID on a smartphone (or sometimes Freja e-ID, which also requires a smartphone), for things like ordering from pharmacies, doing your taxes online (and getting your tax return sooner), accessing healthcare services etc, and meanwhile physical alternatives like physical pharmacies are increasingly getting outcompeted and shutdown. So you may be able to get by without one, but at the cost of getting cut off from parts of society, and that's likely to increase.

And of course there was recently the news that the UK may require a digital ID (probably on and Android or iOS phone) in order to get employment or residence: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-digit...

I mean, I think they're wrong. But that said... what's the argument here? Apple shouldn't be allowed to say that they hate a law that they actually hate? Apple should absolutely feel entitled ("emboldened" even) to express their opinions. That's the whole point about civil discourse, no?

https://www.piratewires.com/p/eu-weaponizes-regulation-us-te...

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/the-digital-markets-a...

Which doesn’t read like a demand to me. Now, we may all agree or disagree with Apple’s claim, but characterizing it as a “demand” is pure modern journalism.

Oh I see someone's updated the URL so now this is just a dupe of that submission (it was formerly linked to a tweet)

1Kg of Beef costs:

  - The energy equivalent of 60.000 ChatGPT queries.
  - The water equivalent of 50.000.000 ChatGPT queries.

  - The water equivalent of 18.8 Tons of Beef.
  - The CO2 equivalent of 204 Tons of Beef.

and one large LLM per 6 months.

So yeah, maybe use ChatGPT to ask for vegan recipes.

People will try to blame everything else they can get a hold on before changing the stuff that really has an impact, if it means touching their lifestyle.

The LLMs are not the problem here.

  - https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environmental-standard-for-ai
  - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201677/greenhouse-gas-emissions-of-major-food-products/
  - https://www.statista.com/chart/9483/how-thirsty-is-our-food/
  - https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
  - https://x.com/sama/status/1890820962993533232

“average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours of energy” - or 0.00034MWH

Using this calculator: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... - in my zip, 0.0002KG of CO2 per MWH. (Though, I suppose it depends more on the zip where they’re doing inference, however this translation didn’t seem to vary much when I tried other zips)

Then, 99.48KG/0.0002KG= 497,400 chatGPT queries worth of CO2 per KG of beef?

Thanks for sharing!

I think I used Btu (thermal units) in my calculation, so I only calculated actual energy expenditure for my 60.000 queries result.

But you are right, a better metric might be to use CO2-equivalent, because cows emit a lot of methane, whereas chatbots don't.

99.48KG / 0.228kg/kq = 436,315 queries per kg of beef.

Yup checks out!

> Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

— https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...

He’s done some good followup articles as well:

https://andymasley.substack.com/s/ai-and-the-environment

I use LLMs to do all of my coding these days, it's certainly more essential for feeding me than beef.

This is exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance in people that I meant.

You literally see the math and go "but I like my meat, why should I give that up if you got your AI".

Because, as I just demonstrated, my AI takes a infinitesimal fraction of your meat.

It literally takes you only going vegan for a day to offset your entire AI usage of a year.

And any discussion that tries to frame them as somewhat equally important issues is dishonest and either malicious or delusional.

My guess, as I've expressed earlier in the comment chain, is that it's emotionally easier for people to bike-shed about the 0.01% of their environmental impact, than to actually tackle things that make up 20%.

And no it's not only beef (which is a stand-in for meat and diary), another low hanging fruit is also transport, like switching your car for a bike.

But switching from meat and diary to a vegan diet would reduce up to 20% of your personal environmental impact, in terms of CO2.

And about 80-90% of rainforest deforestation is driven directly or indirectly by livestock production.

So it's simply the easiest most impactful thing everyone can do. (Switching your car for a bike isn't possible for people in rural areas for example.)

Seeing as these models being wasteful is integral to the revenue of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, the more people that tell them that the right business strategy is to start perpetually building data centers and power plants, the less incentive they have to build models that run efficiently on consumer hardware.

Skip meat for one day, use AI for a year, come out ahead.

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-memphis-illegal-generators

And it's not a thought experiment. It's a very real suggestion. If you're worried about the resource cost from your personal use, doing something to 100% offset it lets you stop worrying.

> become vegan

For one day per year. Replacing a day you would have otherwise eaten meat. That is an extremely attainable action for anyone that cares enough about LLM resource use enough to strongly consider avoiding them. It's not something that "will not change".

By the way, your goal of running efficiently on consumer hardware isn't as great as it sounds. One of the best ways to improve efficiency is batching multiple requests, and datacenter hardware generally uses more efficient nodes and runs at more efficient clock speeds. There's an efficiency sweet spot where models are moderately too big to run at home.

And it really undermines your argument when you throw in this stupid strawman about elon's toxic generators. You know j-pb was talking about typical datacenter resource use and not that. Get that insulting claim out of here.

If "use LLMs for a year" is enough to count as having a climate impact (negatively), then yes I believe "skip meat for a day use LLMs for a year" is enough to count (positively).

I'd be tempted to write off both of those, but the whole point of your argument is to consider LLM resource use important, so I'm completely accepting that for the sake of the above argument.

There are no theoretical vegans involved.

And the suggestion doesn't even involve vegans, unless there's a massive contingent of americans that only eat meat one day per year that I wasn't aware of.

And to get at what I think is your core objection: The fact that people can do this isn't being used to let companies off the hook. If only 2% of LLM users set up a meat skipping day, then LLM companies are only 2% let off the hook.

But at the same time let's keep a proportional sense of how big the hook is.

> They exist in the real world, right now. It is a real phenomenon

The strawman is you accusing people of supporting those generators.

> your position that using LLMs is categorically fine

I didn't say that.

Sorry, I should have clarified. In this case I meant “argument” as a thing that leads real people to either understand or agree with your position, not the construction of an idea in your mind.

With that in mind, do you think that “skip meat for a day use LLMs for a year” will convince enough real people, in real life, to not eat meat, that it offsets the emissions from LLM use?

Like imagine the future.

Since LLM use is a new category of energy use, you would have to convince people that haven’t already been convinced to skip meat by animal cruelty, health, philosophy, or existing climate concerns. People that were vegan before LLMs became popular obviously don’t count. The group of people that resisted decades of all that messaging will now make a meaningful adjustment to their consumption to cancel that out — and there will be enough of these new part time/full time vegans that it offsets the entire chat bot industry’s energy usage.

Do you imagine that being what happens?

If not it’s just somebody advocating for increased consumption in real life by invoking imaginary vegans.

As somebody that’s spent years as a vegan I am incredibly wary of “vegans can recruit” as a pitch. I’ve only ever heard that from people that have never tried to recruit in earnest or charlatans. Like I’ve mostly heard that from people that are not, never have been, and have no interest in being vegan.

Edit:

>The strawman is you accusing people of supporting those generators.

That’s not what a strawman is and it’s not an accusation, it’s an observation. If you say “I want subscription based online batched mega-high-compute language models” you are advocating for that industry, and those generators are part of it. Saying you feel that they’re somehow special and different because they’re icky does not make them any different from the thing that you say is necessarily the future. That you want!

LLM companies only get let off the hook if a very large fraction of their users do the meat skip thing, which is not very likely but could theoretically happen.

LLMs being a new category of energy use should get them some extra scrutiny, but only some. Maybe 3x scrutiny per wasted kilowatt hour compared to entrenched uses? If our real motivation is resource use, and not overreacting to change, LLMs should get some pressure but most of the pressure should go toward preexisting wasteful uses.

Nobody is advocating to ignore LLMs. But we shouldn't overstate them too much either.

And the giving up meat defense is not a defense for the companies, it's a defense for individual users that actually do it.

Like not an if or maybe thing, what do you see when you picture the future?

Do you think “Skip meat for a day use LLMs for a year” will produce enough new vegans to offset the energy usage and co2 produced by the LLM architecture of your choice?

Not asking if you want it to happen or if it’s something you can imagine could happen, I’m asking if you think it will

[_] yes

[_] no

Because if no, then the idea is just advocating for increased real consumption by invoking imaginary vegans!

Edit:

>LLM companies only get let off the hook if a very large fraction of their users do the meat skip thing, which is not very likely but could theoretically happen.

The person I was initially talking to took the position that LLM companies have negligible impact because people can be vegan. J-bp was saying that LLM companies shouldn’t be on anybody’s radars because uh, meat is 100,000 times worse.

The person you hopped in to defend was saying that LLM companies do not and should not have a “hook” because meat eaters exist

[x] no

> Because if no, then the idea is just advocating for increased real consumption by invoking imaginary vegans!

Wrong.

> The person I was initially talking to took the position that LLM companies have negligible impact because people can be vegan.

He said "LLMs are not the problem here", which is true.

And he was arguing for individual use being offset when he said "maybe use ChatGPT to ask for vegan recipes".

The top level comment was also about individual use. "I would really like it if an LLM tool would show me the power consumption and environmental impact of each request I’ve submitted."

The comments right before you replied were also about individual use. "lifestyle choice".

> J-bp was saying that LLM companies shouldn’t be on anybody’s radars because uh, meat is 100,000 times worse.

The 100,000 number was a throwaway hypothetical to make a point. Not a number he was applying to LLMs in particular. Two lines later he threw in a 2,000x too.

And what he said is that LLM companies are not "somewhat equally important". Which is true. He didn't say you should ignore them entirely, just to have a sense of proportion.

-

Edit: Here is an important distinction that I think isn't getting through. There are multiple separate points being made by j-bp:

Point A, about not eating meat for a day, is only excusing anyone that actually does it. It's not a hypothetical that excuses the entire company.

Point B, about the size of the impact, suggests caring less about LLMs based on raw resource use. Point B does not care about the relatively small group of people that take up the offer in Point A. Point B is just looking at the big picture.

Then it is not a “very serious suggestion”. It is a thought experiment which should be taken with commensurate weight.

>Wrong

Explain what “skip a day of meat do a year of LLMs” is then. If it’s not just an ad for feeling good about using LLMs, what is it?

>The 100,000 number was a throwaway hypothetical to make a point

>Two lines later he threw in a 2,000x too.

Alright he said that meat is 2,000 times worse than language models as well as 100,000 times worse than language models. He might have meant 100k but could also mean 2k.

Do you have a real problem in real life where if somebody called you and said “it’s gotten two thousand times worse” versus “it’s gotten a hundred thousand times worse?” the former would be fine and the latter alarming?

If yes, what is the problem? Why was it a problem at 1x? 2000x? 100,000x? Why was it a problem at at 1x and 100,000x but not 2000x?

You can stop being part of the problem if you do it. The problem still exists, but you are no longer part of it. You reduced it by more than your fair share. While the problem would stop existing if everyone made the same choice, there's no pretense that that's actually going to happen. LLM companies are not being excused by such an unlikely hypothetical.

j-lb also made an argument to not care much about LLMs at all, but it was separate from the "skip a day of meat" argument. That's where the big multiplier comes in. But again, separate argument.

I don't want to argue about the example ratio he used. The real ratio is very big if the numbers cited earlier are correct. So if you're going to sit here and say 2000x might as well be arbitrarily large then I think you just joined the "LLM resource use doesn't matter" team, because going by the above citation 2000x is in the ballpark of the correct number, so LLM use is 1 divided by arbitrarily large, making it negligible. Congrats.

I’m not the one that brought up moralizing or food. I can’t really comment on your relationship with your diet but it kind of seems like you saw somebody mention power usage and unprompted shared “well I don’t eat meat or cheese or yogurt” so I guess keep that up while you use enough energy to power your home to write some code slower than you would without it?

https://www.infoworld.com/article/4020931/ai-coding-tools-ca...

I gave a little more detail to my point about climate impact here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44654552

[0] https://www.kildwick.com/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=j-pb

If you buy $10 in tokens, that probably folds into ~$3 to $5 dollars in electricity.

Which would be around 30 to 90 kWhr in electricity.

Depending on the source, it could be anywhere from ~500g/kWhr (for natural gas) and ~24g/kWhr for hydroelectric.

It's a really wide spread, but I'd say for $10 in tokens, you'd probably be in the neighbourhood of 1 kg to 40 kg of emissions.

What's a good thing is that a lot of the spread comes from the electricity source. So if we can get all of these datacenters on clean energy sources it could change emissions by over an order of magnitude compared to gas turbines (like XAi uses).

I don't think the cost of the ai is close to converging to the price of power yet. Right now its mostly the price of hardware and data center space minus subsidies.

People are selling AI at a loss right now.