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AI’s Growing Carbon Footprint – State of the Planet

news.climate.columbia.edu · 3,656 words · saved by 1 readers

These days, the buzz is all about artificial intelligence (AI), computer systems that can sense their environment, think, learn, and act in response to their programmed objectives. Because of AI’s capabilities, there are many ways it can help combat climate change, but will its potential to aid decarbonization and adaptation outweigh the enormous amounts of energy it consumes? Or will AI’s growing carbon footprint put our climate goals out of reach? Earlier this year, several large language models—revolutionary types of AI trained on huge amounts of text that can generate human sounding text—were launched. The first large language model appeared in the 1950s, but today’s models are vastly more sophisticated. The most popular new models are Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing search engine, Google’s Bard, and OpenAI’s GPT-4. When I asked Bard why large language models are revolutionary, it answered that it is “because they can perform a wide range of tasks that were previously thought to be imp

AI’s Growing Carbon Footprint – State of the Planet Skip to content Climate AI’s Growing Carbon Footprint Renée Cho June 9, 2023 2 comments on AI’s Growing Carbon Footprint Photo: Mike MacKenzie These days, the buzz is all about artificial intelligence (AI), computer systems that can sense their environment, think, learn, and act in response to their programmed objectives. Because of AI’s capabilities, there are many ways it can help combat climate change, but will its potential to aid decarbonization and adaptation outweigh the enormous amounts of energy it consumes? Or will AI’s growin

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