Additionally, GPT-3 needs to “drink” (i.e., consume) a 500ml bottle of water for roughly 10 – 50 medium-length responses, depending on when and where it is deployed.
Worth noting that this water usage is mostly from the electricity, making electricity uses water. You are pretty accurate in your assessment and I’m surprised this is an askchapo post rather then an effort post. It is overblown. It honestly strikes me as a distraction from the actual climate polluters. A small reduction of the meat industry would be massively more impactful then stopping all AI models. There’s other criticisms of AI that work better imo.
it also helps how for the last few years they been using more renewable energies, which cut out a lot of the emissions in regards for AI stuff no?
I mean 
not really imo. If that electricity could have been redirected to turning off a fossil fuel plant then its still the same “pool” being used. If a datacenter uses 90% renewable but that means the city uses more fossil fuels instead of that renewable, its a wash.
edit: Here’s another link I found when searching around, his math works to 0.3wh for small queries. Obviously consider the source etc etc but I personally don’t see an issue with this calculations. He also covers training and gpu production costs if you are interested (though briefly).
Happier then I am