AI ‘accelerating climate crisis’, expert warns

If you care about the environment, think twice before using AI. Generative artificial intelligence consumes 30 times more energy than a traditional search engine, warns researcher Sasha Luccioni, who has made it his mission to raise awareness about the environmental impact of this new and trendy technology.

Recognized as one of the 100 most influential people in the world of AI by the American magazine Time in 2024, the Canadian computer scientist of Russian origin has been seeking for several years to quantify the emissions of programs like ChatGPT or Midjourney.

“I find it particularly disappointing that generative AI is being used to search the Internet,” laments the researcher, who spoke to AFP on the sidelines of the ALL IN artificial intelligence conference in Montreal.

The language models that power the programs require massive amounts of computing power to train on billions of data points, which requires powerful servers.

Then there is the energy used to meet the demands of each individual user.

Instead of simply extracting information, “like a search engine would do to find the capital of a country, for example,” AI programs “generate new information,” making the whole thing “much more energy-intensive,” she explains.

According to the International Energy Agency, the AI ​​and cryptocurrency sectors combined consumed nearly 460 terawatt hours of electricity in 2022, or 2% of total global production.

Energy efficiency

A leading researcher on the impact of AI on the climate, Luccioni helped create a tool in 2020 that allows developers to quantify the carbon footprint of running a piece of code. “CodeCarbon” has since been downloaded more than a million times.

Responsible for the climate strategy of the startup Hugging Face, a platform for sharing open-access AI models, she is now working on the creation of an algorithm certification system.

Similar to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s program that assigns ratings based on the energy consumption of electronic devices and appliances, it would provide insight into an AI product’s energy consumption in order to encourage users and developers to “make better decisions.”

“We don’t take into account water or scarce materials,” she acknowledges, “but at least we know that for a specific task, we can measure energy efficiency and say this model has an A+, and that model has a D,” she says.

Transparency

To develop her tool, Luccioni is experimenting with it on generative AI models that are accessible to everyone, or open source, but she would also like to do it on commercial models from Google or OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, which have hesitated to give their agreement.

Although Microsoft and Google have committed to achieving carbon neutrality by the end of the decade, the US tech giants have seen their greenhouse gas emissions skyrocket in 2023 due to AI: +48% for Google compared to 2019 and +29% for Microsoft compared to 2020.

“We are accelerating the climate crisis,” Luccioni says, calling for more transparency from tech companies.

The solution, she said, could come from governments that are currently “flying blind,” without knowing what is in “the data sets or how the algorithms are trained.”

“Once we have transparency, we can start legislating.”

“Energy sobriety”

It also requires “explaining to people what generative AI can and cannot do, and at what cost,” Luccioni said.

In her latest study, the researcher demonstrated that producing a high-definition image using artificial intelligence consumes as much energy as fully recharging the battery of your mobile phone.

At a time when more and more companies want to integrate technology more into our lives – with chatbots and connected objects, or in online searches – Luccioni advocates “energy sobriety”.

The idea here is not to oppose AI, she emphasizes, but rather to choose the right tools – and use them wisely.

© 2024 AFP