We are fueling the climate crisis with the indiscriminate use of artificial intelligence

Prominent researcher Sasha Luccioni, who has done various activities to inform people about the environmental impact of artificial intelligence and is also involved in the startup Hugging Face, warns that artificial intelligence is 30 times more productive than a traditional search engine. It consumes energy. According to him, the indiscriminate use of productive artificial intelligence tools accelerates the climate crisis.

According to the AFP report, Sascha Luccioni talked about the dangers of artificial intelligence on the environment on the sidelines of the ALL IN artificial intelligence conference in Montreal, Canada; “I find it frustrating to use generative AI as an internet search engine,” he lamented. According to Luccioni, it is necessary to “explain to people what generative AI can and cannot do, and at what cost.”

It should be noted that this Canadian computer scientist was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world of artificial intelligence in 2024.

Effects of productive artificial intelligence on the climate crisis

The language models on which generative artificial intelligence tools are developed require huge computing resources to train with billions of data and powerful servers. Each user request from these tools also consumes a certain amount of energy.

Sascha Luccioni explains that AI tools should not be limited to simple information extraction, such as finding the capital of a country; A simple search engine can also do this information. “We are accelerating the climate crisis,” he says.

In 2020, Luccioni helped create a tool called CodeCarbon for developers to show the carbon footprint of a piece of code as it runs. The tool has since been downloaded over a million times. Two years later, he published research to calculate the carbon produced by a large language model. The study estimated that BLOOM, then the world’s largest multilingual artificial intelligence model, had produced more than 50 tons of carbon dioxide over its life cycle. This amount is roughly equivalent to 80 flights from London to New York.

He now wants to do this on the business models of Google and OpenAI. Of course, it seems that these two companies are not willing to do such a thing.

Although Microsoft and Google have committed to becoming carbon neutral by the end of this decade, the tech giants saw their emissions increase in 2023 due to AI: 48 percent for Google compared to 2019 and 29 percent for Microsoft. to the year 2020.