I saw similar faux outrage over carbon emissions from training large models. For example, this paper[1] involves hand wringing over the fact that training an original BERT model could have similar emissions to a trans-Atlantic flight. That despite the fact that thousands of such flights occur daily and BERT is (was?) used in a majority of all Google searches.
It actually seems like they mean a single flight as in, a single person's share of CO2 emissions from a flight, not like, the whole flight itself. Their reference for the emissions is this paper[2] which says BERT took 80 hours on 64 v100's and estimates that as 1.4k pounds of CO2 compared to Googling which suggests a single person's share of a flight from the US to the UK is around 1k kilograms of emissions (and about 10-20 dollars of carbon emissions offsets).
Some people just want to find things to complain about.
It actually seems like they mean a single flight as in, a single person's share of CO2 emissions from a flight, not like, the whole flight itself. Their reference for the emissions is this paper[2] which says BERT took 80 hours on 64 v100's and estimates that as 1.4k pounds of CO2 compared to Googling which suggests a single person's share of a flight from the US to the UK is around 1k kilograms of emissions (and about 10-20 dollars of carbon emissions offsets).
Some people just want to find things to complain about.
1 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
2 - https://aclanthology.org/P19-1355.pdf