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).

This is harder than it looks. A “router” model often has to be quite large to maintain routing accuracy, especially if you’re trying to understand regular user requests.

Small on-device models gating more powerful models most likely just leads to mis-routes.

Fossil fuel companies are damn good at PR, and they know well that they simply can't make themselves look good. The next best thing? Make someone else look worse.

If an Average Joe hears "a company that hurts the environment" and thinks OpenAI and not British Petroleum, that's a PR win.

Even if the company is "green" they make money, they pay employees/stockholders, those people use the money to buy more things and go on vacations in airplanes. Worse, they invest the money to make more money and consume more goods.

Even your gains and vegetables are shipped in to feed you, if you walk to the grocery store. You pay rent/mortgage for a house built with concrete and steel. The highest priced items you pay for are also likely the most energy and environmentally costly. They create GDP.

It's a little weird with LLMs right now, because everything is subsidized by VC, Ads, BigCo investment so you can't see real costs. They're probably higher than the $30-200/mo you pay, but they're not 10x the price like your rent, car payment, food, vacation, investment/pension are.