The Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry is rapidly growing as major companies like Google and Microsoft releasing AI models after Open AI’s big hit in creating Gen AI and Chat GPT. The AI industry has grown significantly ,leading to consequential impacts on our environment. Global data center electricity consumption has been increasing by 20-40% annually in recent years, contributing to 1% of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in 2022.
Figure 1 [The tasks examined in the study and the average quantity of carbon emissions they produced (in g of 𝐶𝑂2) for 1,000 queries. Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University, 2023]
Studies conducted by Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University in 2023 showthat operational energy as well as carbon are required to perform the training of AI models, representing an impressive portion of energy consumption. Among the 13 multi-purpose generative AI models, the most energy and carbon-intensive tasks are those that generate new content such as text generation, summarization, and image generation. The AI image generation model has the highest carbon footprint among these tasks.
John K Leung, an assistant professor of Computational and Data Science at George Mason University Korea, explained the relationship between AI and energy consumption. “Carbon footprints occur in AI mostly, and it is during a time when they are doing AI model training exercises. Usually, large models consume more energy because we need thousands of high-power computers to collaborate with the data set. Which leads to produce more carbon footprint,” explains John K Leung .
The accessibility of AI tools to the general public has increased, leading to more frequent contributions to energy-related CO2 emissions. The relationship between digital carbon footprint emissions and the environment stems from the usage of digital technology and online activities. Saving energy on digital devices and reducing unnecessary data can help reduce the digital carbon footprint.
“If you want to contribute to a green activity, start by reducing personal energy consumption. . We can personally start by reducing a small amount of it. But, if the whole community joins the activity, that makes a significant change in reducing energy,” Leung adds. “What can you give up for convenience? That thinking leads you to reduce using energy.”
Written by Heewon Yang | Staff Writer
Revised by Seohyun Kim | Managing Editor