How "green" is your Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems face a set of conflicting goals: being accurate (consuming large amounts of computational power and electrical power) and being accessible (being lower in cost, less computationally intensive, and less power-hungry). Unfortunately, many of today's AI implementations are environmentally unsustainable. Improvements in AI energy efficiency will be driven by several factors, including more efficient algorithms, more efficient computing architectures, and more efficient components. It's necessary to measure and track the energy consumption of AI systems to identify any improvements in energy efficiency. One example of the increasing awareness of the importance of energy consumption in AI systems is having is reflected in the fact that the ULPMark (ultra-low power) benchmark line from EEMBC is now adding ML inference and developing a new benchmark, the ULPMark-ML.