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GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

1066 points · 953 comments · crorella

  1. IshKebab · · focus · HN ↗
    I wish they'd list the environmental cost. My employer has an unlimited AI budget so I don't care about using Astra if it's just more profit for OpenAI. I care more if it actually uses 5x more energy.
    1. rs_rs_rs_rs_rs · · focus · HN ↗
      I don't understand the point of this, why just now when it comes to llms. Why wasn't anyone enraged with the environmental costs of kids playing video games. I would not be surprised the environmental cost of that is an order of magnitude bigger than what llms have.

      Edit: for context, just Steam alone has ~200million monthly active users.

      1. paulryanrogers · · focus · HN ↗
        Considering Nvidia's hard shift to crypto and now AI, I doubt videogames are even in the same ballpark.

        How many DCs are devoted solely to gaming?

        1. lp92 · · focus · HN ↗
          Considering many games make use of cloud computing for online play and similar functions, they probably make up a pretty goot bit of global cloud compute capacity. Likely quite a lot less than the big AI players, but not an insignificant amount.
          1. HelloMcFly · · focus · HN ↗
            The energy costs of the cloud computing required for gaming are substantially less in power - not to mention overall demand - than LLMs. Come on, we're not in the same energy ballpark here.
            1. empthought · · focus · HN ↗
              You're not including the physical supply chain energy consumption of distributing video game equipment in this analysis. Nobody ships LLMs to big box stores and tries to sell them to consumers.
              1. paulryanrogers · · focus · HN ↗
                Historically all those boxes and discs were significant, at least if you sum them all for all time.

                Today physical discs are rapidly becoming a niche that newer consoles just won't have. PC games are almost never sold physically anymore.

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