If you’re a heavy agentic AI user and this prompts you to offset CO2eq emitted via donations and you’re wondering how much to donate, here’s yet another BOTEC-ed table for reference, courtesy of Scott Alexander.
For instance, I think my token consumption is (ballpark) an order of mag lower than Zeke. That’s 7 cheeseburgers, so I’d offset a year of my AI usage by donating optimistically ~$0.60 to Native Energy (to pay people in 3rd world countries to not cut down trees, with all the ways that ToC can fail) or if I wanted more confidence, ~$40 to Climeworks (to suck CO2 out of the air and stick it into the ground). $40 is $3.30 per month, which seems like a small premium to pay on top of my AI subscription.
A key uncertainty is true per-token energy consumption, which nobody knows. If I were pessimistic and really wanted to cover my bases with the offset donations, the 25% cache reads assumption implies doubling my energy consumption estimate, so 14 cheeseburgers or $80 to Climeworks.
(To be clear I don’t really eat cheeseburgers, so eating 14 fewer of them in a year isn’t really an option available to me. Also the Climeworks estimate is from 2021, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve gotten more cost-effective since at capturing and storing CO2, so the pessimistic donation amount may be much lower)
BOTEC of the day—some charts on the energy use of agentic AI by Zeke Hausfather:
If you’re a heavy agentic AI user and this prompts you to offset CO2eq emitted via donations and you’re wondering how much to donate, here’s yet another BOTEC-ed table for reference, courtesy of Scott Alexander.
For instance, I think my token consumption is (ballpark) an order of mag lower than Zeke. That’s 7 cheeseburgers, so I’d offset a year of my AI usage by donating optimistically ~$0.60 to Native Energy (to pay people in 3rd world countries to not cut down trees, with all the ways that ToC can fail) or if I wanted more confidence, ~$40 to Climeworks (to suck CO2 out of the air and stick it into the ground). $40 is $3.30 per month, which seems like a small premium to pay on top of my AI subscription.
A key uncertainty is true per-token energy consumption, which nobody knows. If I were pessimistic and really wanted to cover my bases with the offset donations, the 25% cache reads assumption implies doubling my energy consumption estimate, so 14 cheeseburgers or $80 to Climeworks.
(To be clear I don’t really eat cheeseburgers, so eating 14 fewer of them in a year isn’t really an option available to me. Also the Climeworks estimate is from 2021, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve gotten more cost-effective since at capturing and storing CO2, so the pessimistic donation amount may be much lower)