What would it take to make AI ‘greener’?

• AI can be a powerful tool to combat climate change, but its role also as a contributor to emissions cannot be overlooked.
• The first step to make AI greener is to promote the practice of more holistic and multidimensional model evaluation.
• By changing our mindset that bigger is always better and by pursuing AI use cases in the environmental space, AI can be a major asset in the fight against climate change.

With record heat waves globally and extreme flooding impacting Europe and China, now is a pivotal moment to interrogate the interplay of technology and the environment, including the role of artificial intelligence (AI).
What would it take to make AI ‘greener’? On the one hand, we first need to collectively recognize that there are tangible costs to the creation and use of AI systems – and, in fact, they can be quite large. GPT-3, a recent powerful language model by OpenAI, is estimated to have consumed enough energy in training to leave a carbon footprint equivalent to driving a car from Earth to the moon and back.
Continue reading: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/make-ai-greener-climate-solution-cop26-technology/