Everyone must understand the environmental costs of AI
« Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a profound effect on societies around the globe. Its application improves the lives of many, but it can also increase inequities. To safeguard against AI’s negative impacts, all actors must develop and deploy AI responsibly.
The responsible use of AI typically focuses on ensuring fairness, transparency, accountability, and safety but rarely on environmental responsibility. This is a significant oversight as there are many critical ecological implications of AI which cannot simply be ignored, including those associated with storing and processing the vast volumes of data many AI models use to train and operate, to perform task(s) and generate output(s) such as building a representation of the global environment. As an illustration, Luccioni and colleagues reveal in their analysis of energy costs between different models that classification tasks require between 0.002 and 0.007 kWh per 1,000 inferences. In comparison, generative tasks require around ten times more energy for the same number of inferences (around 0.05 kWh). (…) »
source > oecd.ai, Ian R Hodgkinson, Nick Jennings, Tom Jackson, 4 octobre 2024
