Climate crisis: AI is “accelerating the climate crisis,” expert warns

Generative AI uses 30 times more energy than a traditional search engine, researcher warns Sasha Luccioniwith the mission of raising awareness about the environmental impact of this new technology.

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

“I find it particularly disappointing that Generative AI “It’s 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 the programs are based on require enormous computational capabilities to train on billions of data points, which requires powerful servers.

Then there is the energy used to respond to each user’s individual requests.

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Rather than 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 entire process “much more energy intensive,” he explains. According to the International Energy Agency, the combined AI and cryptocurrency sectors consumed nearly 460 terawatt hours of electricity in 2022 — two percent of total global output.

Energy efficiency

Luccioni, a leading researcher on the impact of AI on climate, was involved in 2020 in creating a tool for developers to quantify the carbon footprint to run a piece of code. “CodeCarbon” has since been downloaded more than a million times.

Responsible for the startup’s climate strategy Hugging facean open-access platform for sharing AI models, is now working on creating a certification system for algorithms.

Similar to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s program that awards scores based on energy consumption of electronic devices and appliances, would allow us to know the energy consumption of an AI product to encourage users and developers to “make better decisions.”

“We don’t account for water or rare materials,” he admits, “but at least we know that for a specific task we can measure energy efficiency and say this model gets an A+ and that model gets a D,” he says.

Transparency

To develop his tool, Luccioni is experimenting with open-source or accessible generative AI models, but he would also like to do so with commercial models from Google or ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which have been reluctant to accept.

Although Microsoft and Google have pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by the end of the decade, the US tech giants saw their greenhouse gas emissions skyrocket in 2023 due to AI: 48 percent for Google compared to 2019 and 29 percent for Microsoft compared to 2020.

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

The solution, he says, could come from governments that are currently “flying blind,” not knowing what is in “the data sets or how the algorithms are trained.”

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

‘Energy sobriety’

There is also a need to “explain to people what generative AI can and cannot do, and at what cost,” according to Luccioni.

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

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

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