There is a correlation between the training time and energy consumption, but that doesn’t mean there is a correlation between training time and carbon emissions.
Thanks for your comment. As you rightly point out, energy & carbon are just one aspect of the overall environmental impact of computing. I've written about water quite a bit, for example. It's also true that for consumer products, the manufacturing stage is the largest in terms of the carbon footprint.
However, in the data center it is the opposite. The use stage is the largest component of the carbon footprint, not the hardware manufacturing. I wrote about that a few years ago - https://davidmytton.blog/carbon-footprint-laptops-vs-servers-intel-vs-arm/ - and you can see it in the latest LCA reports from manufacturers such as Dell. AI training is generally done in data centers, at least at large scale, which is why I focused on that here.
Thanks for your comment. As you rightly point out, energy & carbon are just one aspect of the overall environmental impact of computing. I've written about water quite a bit, for example. It's also true that for consumer products, the manufacturing stage is the largest in terms of the carbon footprint.
However, in the data center it is the opposite. The use stage is the largest component of the carbon footprint, not the hardware manufacturing. I wrote about that a few years ago - https://davidmytton.blog/carbon-footprint-laptops-vs-servers-intel-vs-arm/ - and you can see it in the latest LCA reports from manufacturers such as Dell. AI training is generally done in data centers, at least at large scale, which is why I focused on that here.