this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Yes I have.
With a model I fine tuned myself and ran locally on my own hardware.
Suck it
yea this attitude right here is why ai bros are so beloved
Just curious, do you know even as a rough estimation (maybe via the model card) how much energy was used to train the initial model and if so how do you believe it was done so in an ecologically justifiable way?
Just curious. Do you know how many children had a hand in making your electronics?
Just curious, do you know how many trees were MOLESTED to create that air you're breathing?
I know at least seven were. It would've been more but I got a splinter and that really turned me off.
Yeah splinter is too vanilla, try rocksteady x shredder sub
Apologies for my sarcastic answer, I did actually search for that a little while ago so I do assume most people do know but that's incorrect. The most useful tool I know of would probably be https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/uyghurs-for-sale-re-education-forced-labour-and-surveillance-beyond-xinjiang/ It wasn't specific to children but it does show the process and I'd argue can be apply for the different criteria one would want to focus on. It dates back few years ago, when I learned about the problem so there also you might want to prefer a more up to date source.
Let me know if you are looking for something more precise. I know of few other tools which do help better understand who builds what and how, for electronics but other products too.
Straw-hat much or just learning about logistics and sourcing in our globalized supply chain?
Satirically pointing out that worrying about electricity usage for model creation is ridiculous.
It's already spent. The model exists. It's probably MORE moral to use it as much as possible to get some positive value out of it. Otherwise it was just wasted.
Yes indeed, yet my point is that we keep on training models TODAY so if keep on not caring, then we do postpone the same problem, cf https://lemmy.world/post/30563785/17400518
Basically yes, use trained model today if you want but if we don't set a trend then despite the undeniable ecological impact, there will be no corrective measure.
It's not enough to just say "Oh well, it used a ton of energy. We MUST use it now."
Anyway, my overall point was that training takes a ton of energy. I'm not asking your or OP or anyone else NOT to use such models. I'm solely pointing out that doing so without understand the process that lead to such models, including but not limited to energy for training, is naive at best.
Edit: it's also important to point out alternatives that are not models, namely there are already plenty of specialized tools that are MORE efficient AND accurate today. So even if the model took a ton of energy to train, in such case it's still not rational to use it. It's a sunk cost.
How much electricity was wasted for you to post, and us to receive, your human slop
FWIW the person I asked did reply, they don't care : https://lemmy.world/post/30563785/17397024
Hope it helps.
Just curious, do you know how much energy went into powering every computer and office room for 3 years while the latest videogame/hollyowood movie/etc was being made used up?
Should we ban every single non-essential thing in the world or only the ones you don't enjoy?
And please hop-off Lemmy, do you know how much power the devs used to program this site!
That's been addressed few times already so I let you check the history if you are actually curious.
Feel free to explain the down votes.
If it wasn't clear the my point was that self hosting addresses mostly privacy for the user but that is only one dimension addressed. It does not necessarily address the ecological impact. I was honestly hoping this community to care more.
What's clear is that you don't realize how much energy AI actually uses up and you ate up propaganda that you are spreading right now. A querry that runs for 20s to generate an image on a card that uses up at most 350W/h during heavy gaming sessions isn't magically going to doom the world. Chill out.
I'll assume you didn't misread my question on purpose, I didn't ask about inference, I asked about training.
How much energy was used to bring the truckload of groceries into the shop that one time so hundreds of people can use it?
Great point, so are you saying there is a certain threshold above which training is energetically useful but under which it is not, e.g. if training of a large model is used by 1 person, it is not sustainable but if 1 million people use it (assuming it's done productively, not spam or scam) then it is fine?
So you're saying if 1 guy made 1 million results it would offset the training?
Results? I have no idea what you are talking about. I thought we were discussing the training cost (my initial question) and that the truckload was an analogy to argue that the impact from that upfront costs is spread among users.
"I was honestly hoping this community to care more."
So you want us to all go destroy paintings in art gallery and super glue our hands to the road with you?
Please, do whatever you want to protect the environment you cherish. My point though was literally asking somebody who did point a better way to do it if they were aware of all the costs of their solution. If you missed it, their answer was clear : they do not know and they do not care. I was not suggesting activism, solely genuinely wondering if they actually understood the impact of the alternative they showcased. Honestly, just do whatever you can.
You know what, again maybe I'm misreading you.
If you do want to help, do try with me to answer the question. I did give a path to the person initially mentioning the Model Card. Maybe you are aware of that but just in cased a Model Card is basic meta-data about a model, cf https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/model-cards
Some of them do mention CO2 equivalent, see https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/model-cards-co2 so here I don't know which model they used but maybe finding a way have CO2 equivalent for the most popular models, e.g DeepSeek, and some equivalent (they mentioned not driving a car) would help us all grasping at least some of the impact.
What do you think?
Don’t know. Don’t really care honestly. I dont pay for hydro, and whatever energy expenditures were involved in training the model I fine tuned is more than offset by the fact that I don’t and never will drive.
That's some strange logic. Either you do know and you can estimate that the offset will indeed "balance it out" or you don't then you can't say one way or the other.
Running a 500W GPU 24/7 for a full year is less than a quarter of the energy consumed by the average automobile in the US (in 2000). I don’t know how many GPUs this person has or how long it took to fine tune the model, but it’s clearly not creating an ecological disaster. Please understand there is a huge difference between the power consumed by companies training cutting-edge models at massive scale/speed, compared to a locally deployed model doing only fine tuning and inferencing.
I specifically asked about the training part, not the fine tuning but thanks to clarifying.
Edit : you might be interested in helping with https://lemmy.world/post/30563785/17397757 please
The point is that OP (most probably) didn’t train it — they downloaded a pre-trained model and only did fine-tuning and inference.
Right, my point is exactly that though, that OP by having just downloaded it might not realize the training costs. They might be low but on average they are quite high, at least relative to fine-tuning or inference. So my question was precisely to highlight that running locally while not knowing the training cost is naive, ecologically speaking. They did clarify though that they do not care so that's coherent for them. I'm insisting on that point because maybe others would think "Oh... I can run a model locally, then it's not <>" so I'm trying to clarify (and please let me know if I'm wrong) that it is good for privacy but the upfront training cost are not insignificant and might lead some people to prefer NOT relying on very costly to train models and prefer others, or a even a totally different solution.
The model exists already — abstaining from using it doesn’t make the energy consumption go away. I don’t think it’s reasonable to let historic energy costs drive what you do, else you would never touch a computer.
Indeed, the argument is mostly for future usage and future models. The overall point being that assuming training costs are negligible is either naive or showing that one does not care much for the environment.
From a business perspective, if I'm Microsoft or OpenAI, and I see a trend to prioritize models that minimize training costs, or even that users are avoiding costly to train model, I will adapt to it. On the other hand if I see nobody cares for that, or that even building more data center drives the value up, I will build bigger models regardless of usage or energy cost.
The point is that training is expensive and that pointing only to inference is like the Titanic going full speed ahead toward the iceberg saying how small it is. It is not small.
If you're a company you don't care what the home user does. They didn't pay for the model and so their existence in the first place indicates a missed opportunity for market share.
No one is saying training costs are negligible. They're saying the cost has already been paid and they had no say in influencing it then or in the future. If you don't pay for it and they can't tell how often you use it they can't really be influenced by your behavior.
It's like being overly concerned with the impact of a microwave you found by the road. The maker doesn't care about your opinion of it because you don't give them money. The don't even know you exist. The only thing you can meaningfully influence is how it's used today.
It's literally what the person I initially asked said though, they said they don't know and don't care.
That's far from saying they're negligible. What they're saying is inline with my point. If you find a microwave are you going to research how green it's manufacturing was so you can ensure you only find good ones for free in the future?
Irrelevant or moot is different from negligible. One says it's small enough to not matter, and the other says it doesn't affect your actions.
I play with AI models on my own computer. I think the training costs are far from negligible and for the most part shouldn't have been bothered with. (I'm very tolerant of research models that are then made public. Even though the tech isn't scalable or as world changing as some think doesn't mean it isn't worth understanding or that it won't lead to something more viable later. Churning it over and over without open results or novelty isn't worth it though). I also think that the training costs are irrelevant with regards to how I use it at home. They're spent before I knew it existed, and they never have or will see information or feedback from me.
My home usage had less impact than using my computer for games has.
I'm playing games at home. I'm running models at home (I linked in other similar answers to it) for benchmarking.
My point is that models are just like anything I bring into my home I try to only buy products that are manufactured properly. Someone else in this thread asked me about child labor for electronics and IMHO that was actually a good analogy. You here mention buying a microwave and that's another good example.
Yes, if we do want to establish feedback in the supply chain, we must know how everything we rely on is made. It's that simple.
There are already quite a few initiatives for that with e.g. coffee with Fair Trade Certification or ISO 14001, in electronics Fair Materials, etc.
The point being that there are already mechanisms for feedback in other fields and in ML there are already model cards with a
co2_eq_emissionsfield, so why couldn't feedback also work in this field?I didn't mention buying a microwave, I mentioned finding one for free. If you buy a microwave you're a customer and your desire for ethical products can be impactful to some degree.
If you find a microwave there's no feedback, and if there were feedback they wouldn't care because you're not a customer.
The way you establish feedback in this field is by making it a viable market, and then giving your money to the most ethical company. I don't think that any of the companies offer or will offer a product that will be worth the cost or resource investment. Ergo: I don't give them money or use their products.
Downloading a model doesn't change that feedback. It's digital, so once the resources are spent copies have no additional cost. They don't get metrics or usage patterns, or even know I have it.
It's not quite, but kinda, like saying that you should only shoplift fair trade coffee. This doesn't signal to anyone that they should invest in making their coffee more equitable.
Herpa Derpa flurbidy
I see. Well, I checked your post history because I thought "Heck, they sound smart, maybe I'm the problem." and my conclusion based on the floral language you often use with others is that you are clearly provoking on purpose.
Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of time to argue this way so I'll just block you, this way we won't have to interact in the future.
Take care and may we never speak again.
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