I have a suggestion rooted in both my love of the service and my concern about the environmental impact of AI compute. Also, honestly, I get flak sometimes from people who are rabid about the subject.
Could we have a “low carbon” mode of some sort? Example:
• Off-Peak Option: Opt to defer non-urgent queries to off-peak hours.
• Low-Energy Model Preference: Give users the ability to default to smaller, less energy-intensive models (e.g., o3-mini) for general use, switching to larger models only when needed. (For this, it would be ideal to append a proportional “green leaf” characters to the end of each model’s name in the dropdown, e.g. “o3-mini” followed by this:
• Carbon Footprint Transparency: Provide an estimate of the carbon impact of sessions or queries, the way some cloud platforms now offer carbon dashboards.
• Carbon Offset Purchases: Allow users to optionally fund verified carbon offsets for their usage, like for flights or events in some regions.
I believe many users would welcome the opportunity to align their AI usage with their environmental values—and some (like me) might even be willing to pay a little more for a greener subscription tier. It would also reflect positively on OpenAI’s leadership in responsible AI deployment.