What negative externalities? Those prompts probably resulted in a tiny amount of CO2 emissions and a tiny amount of water usage. Evaporating a gram of water and emitting a milligram of CO2 seems like a good deal for making your class better for all your students.
In the US, on average, generating 1 kWh produces 364.5 g of CO2. 1 kW may be somewhat pessimistic, but I think it's in the right ballpark for power consumption of DC inference. If processing the prompt took a minute of continuous inference (and I'm going to guess it took a fair bit more), that's 6 grams of CO2.
>What negative externalities?
Off the top of my head,
* All the ways AIs can be misused, either by people who don't understand them (by asking them for advice, etc.) or by people who want to take advantage of others (spam, scams, etc.).
* The power and resource usage of the above, both for inference as well as to deal with them.
> If processing the prompt took a minute of continuous inference (and I'm going to guess it took a fair bit more), that's 6 grams of CO2.
Neither of us really knows, but I'm going to guess it took a fair bit less. You need to consider the marginal cost of one more prompt, not the cost of running the datacenter in the first place. And with batching, hundreds of requests are executed in parallel on the same hardware. I'll concede that a milligram was an exaggeration though.
For comparison, a typical car in the US emits about 400 grams of CO2 per mile. And I know few people who beat themselves up over the externalities of unnecessarily driving one mile.
> * All the ways AIs can be misused, either by people who don't understand them (by asking them for advice, etc.) or by people who want to take advantage of others (spam, scams, etc.).
This is not an externality because it is not a consequence of using AI for good purposes. It's like saying an externality of using a hammer to build a shed is all the ways hammers can be misused.
Still, I respect you for considering the externalities of your actions. That's farther than most go. But I think they are outweighed by the benefits in this case
>This is not an externality because it is not a consequence of using AI for good purposes. It's like saying an externality of using a hammer to build a shed is all the ways hammers can be misused.
I guess we're talking about different questions. You're talking about the externalities of using a piece of technology, while I'm talking about the externalities of a piece of technology existing.
