CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Much has been written by journalists, scholars, policy makers and even the UN, about how artificial intelligence could be used to help combat climate change. But a new article from the MIT Sloan Management Review, warns that AI’s potential contributions to solving the climate crisis could be overshadowed by its enormous energy use and carbon emissions, e-waste, and water use.
The article points out a number of areas where the expanded user of AI technologies could have serious environmental consequences. For example, a single ChatGPT query can generate 100 times more carbon than a regular Google search. In addition, training OpenAI’s GPT-3 model is estimated to have used the equivalent of 120 average U.S. households’ annual energy consumption; an average data center, critical infrastructure for AI, consumes the equivalent of heating 50,000 homes yearly; and Microsoft and Google’s use of water to cool data centers has grown by millions of gallons as they develop cutting-edge AI technologies, the research found.
