The Carbon Footprint Of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform how we fight climate change. However, it also increasingly contributes to it: the carbon footprint of AI will grow exponentially over the next decade, and is projected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 44% globally through 2025. The industry is trending towards bigger models (e.g. GPT-3): these require ever-growing datasets, compute budgets, and incur massive energy bills over the model lifecycle. Computational costs of AI models have been doubling every few months, resulting in an estimated 300,000x increase from 2012-2018.