https://www.nationofchange.org/2023/10/13/ai-tech-could-require-as-much-electricity-as-a-small-nation-study-finds/
#AI tech could require as much #electricity as a small nation, study finds
By Paige Bennett -October 13, 2023
“Looking at the growing demand for AI service, it’s very likely that energy consumption related to AI will significantly increase in the coming years,” de Vries said, as reported by ScienceDaily.
According to de Vries, training AI is one of the most energy-consuming processes of using this technology. For instance, Hugging Face, an AI company, shared that one of its AI models alone, BigScience Large Open-Science Open-Access Multilingual (BLOOM), needed 433 MWh of electricity for training. That’s enough energy to power about 40 average U.S. households for a year, Euronews reported.
After training, AI goes through an inference phase, where users put in their questions and AI generates responses based on these new prompts. This also requires a lot of energy. De Vries wrote, “Research firm SemiAnalysis suggested that OpenAI required 3,617 of NVIDIA’s HGX A100 servers, with a total of 28,936 graphics processing units (GPUs), to support ChatGPT, implying an energy demand of 564 MWh per day.”
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De Vries further warned that AI has limitations and shouldn’t be used for everything, especially considering its privacy concerns and high energy demand. Instead, he said companies should be mindful of how they utilize this technology, only using it when it is really necessary or so beneficial that the costs are outweighed. De Vries also recommended that policymakers consider requiring environmental disclosures for AI and AI supply chains."...
