“We’re talking about ChatGPT, and we don’t know anything about it,” said Sasha Luccioni, a researcher at artificial intelligence company Hugging Face Inc. Bloomberg.
“It could be three raccoons in a trench coat,” said Luccioni, who wrote a paper quantifying the carbon impact of his company’s BLOOM, a rival to OpenAI’s GPT-3.
Based on a limited set of publicly available data, Luccioni attempted to estimate the same for OpenAI’s viral hit ChatGPT.
AI giants don’t disclose carbon emissions chart
Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT use cloud computing, which depends on thousands of servers in huge data centers around the world.
This is done to train AI algorithms known as models by analyzing data to help them “learn” to perform tasks.
Several companies are racing to develop products that leverage massive AI models to deliver functionality to anyone from Instacart customers to Snap users to CFOs in response to ChatGPT’s success.
“Obviously these companies don’t like to disclose what model they’re using and how much carbon they’re emitting,” said Roy Schwartz, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who teamed up with a Microsoft group to measure the carbon footprint of a large AI model.
AI consumes more energy
Artificial intelligence consumes more energy than traditional types of computing, and training a single model can consume more electricity in a year than 100 US homes.
The industry is growing so rapidly and is so opaque that no one knows for sure how much of global electricity use and carbon emissions is attributable to AI.