Council Post: Why We Should Care About The Environmental Impact Of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a subject of great debate when it comes to ethics, but one area people might not think about is its carbon footprint. A study released last year by MIT Technology Review found that training a "regular" AI using a single high-performance graphics card has the same carbon footprint as a flight across the United States. Training a more sophisticated AI was even worse, pumping five times more CO2 into the atmosphere than the entire life cycle of an American car, including its manufacturing. Whether it's the latest AI or machine learning algorithm that's active on a system, a new 5G network deployed at a commercial building or people streaming the latest Twitch gaming video, people generate and consume a lot of data. All that data must be captured, stored, analyzed and sent back out, which requires significant amounts of processing power.