AI: The dirty secret

The amazing abilities of the AI, which is now the talk of the town, must have awed you too.

But we are not here to talk about the wondrous abilities of AI. We bet you've already scrolled past a gazillion Insta and LinkedIn posts raving about it. 📢

The whole buzz got us thinking - what is the environmental footprint of AI?

Psst... guess what? It doesn't look that good. 👎

The AI industry has a terrible carbon footprint. 

Deep learning, a method used to train AI,  requires processing enormous volumes of data. And, for that, you need a huge amount of power. 

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found that training large artificial intelligence models produces 626,000 pounds of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent). 

This is equivalent to five cars' lifetime emissions and nearly 56 times more than an average person produces yearly. Damn!

AI models run on electrically powered hardware resources like networks, processors, and memory. This process will produce emissions unless the electricity used is renewable.

However...

AI might be a part of the climate crisis, but it can be a powerful tool to fight climate change through smart grid design, low-emission infrastructure development, and climate change modelling.

They may even make it easier to anticipate and prepare for extreme weather.

But understanding the environmental impacts of AI seems like the crucial step before we excessively use them. 

For now, let's count on our intelligent engineers to come up with clever solutions.

The human brain is incredibly powerful and uses very little energy. What do you think—can we create a machine as mighty and efficient as the human brain?

P. S. Here's some tech dosage for the nerdy heads 🤓

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-carbon-footprint-of-chatgpt-66932314627d

https://medium.com/@anuj_shah/computing-carbon-footprint-of-training-ai-models-7b0311ec056b

Can board games teach us about climate change? 

Have a look at Daybreak, an upcoming board game about stopping climate change.

That's a wrap for this week! Stay tuned for more fun and informative content coming your way soon! ⌛