How Green is AI?

I’ve just listened to a BBC programme that was broadcast recently which really opened my eyes about the environmental impact of AI.

AI is becoming more prevalent and we are now using it regularly in our work and personal lives.  It’s now with us all the time on our computers and phones.

We use it because of what it can do, but we don’t see all the computing power that is necessary to drive it.  That means data centres using a huge amount of energy.  In some cases they even their own mini gas powered power stations because the local grid doesn’t have the power to run them.

It also means companies like Google and Microsoft struggling to meet carbon reduction targets because of a rapidly increasing demand for electricity to power the systems running their AI development.

In the future this computing power will certainly use more renewable energy, but at the moment it is a significant source of carbon emissions.  It’s hard to know exactly how much, but it’s estimated that data centres are responsible for as much pollution as the aviation industry.

Estimates also suggest that a web search using an AI system can use up to 30 times the power of a regular search engine, and that the power needed for AI to produce a high resolution image could be as much as half a mobile phone charge.  It’s easy to be unaware of this because the power is being used by invisible data centres “in the cloud”.

This is something that I’m sure will be more widely discussed as time passes, and there are plenty of people working on solutions.  However at the moment I think it would be good to be mindful of how we use AI.  It’s great for doing the things it does really well, like creating or summarising a document.  However when we’re just searching for information it’s probably better to stick to a regular search engine.

The original BBC programme can be found here:    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00208g4