AI on Track to Gobble Up as Much Energy as a Country, Study Finds – By Nikki Main (Gizmodo) / Oct 11, 2023
It’s crypto mining all over again, as new technologies stymie progress in cutting carbon emissions.
Artificial intelligence may have a larger impact on the environment than previously thought, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Joule. The research found that AI could undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions by eventually consuming as much energy as a country the size of Sweden.
That could happen in just a few years, based on how quickly the technology is advancing, according to Alex de Vries, a PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam School of Business and Economics and author of the new paper. De Vries explains in his study that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT consume substantial datasets to train the AI. “If you’re going to be expending a lot of resources and setting up these really large models and trying them for some time, that’s going to be a potential big waste of power,” de Vries told The Verge.
Training AI models uses a lot of energy, but that’s not the only concern. De Vries noted that Google reported 60% of its AI-related energy consumption from 2019 through 2021 stemmed from what’s called the inference phase of production. After AI models are trained, they transition into the inference phase, generating information based on new inputs. While past work has looked at the energy consumed by AI training, de Vries says more needs to be done to account for the full AI life cycle.
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