How Having Bigger AI Models Can Have A Detrimental Impact On Environment

The COVID crisis has skyrocketed the applications of artificial intelligence -- from tackling this global pandemic, to being a vital tool in managing various business processes. Despite its benefits, AI has always been scrutinised for its ethical concerns like existing biases and privacy issues. However, this technology also has some significant sustainability issues – it is known to consume a massive amount of energy, creating a negative impact on the environment. As AI technology is getting advanced in predicting weather, understanding human speech, enhancing banking payments, and revolutionising healthcare, the advanced models are not only required to be trained on large datasets, but also require massive computing power to improve its accuracy. Such heavy computing and processing consumes a tremendous amount of energy and emits carbon dioxide, which has become an environmental concern. According to a report, it has been estimated that the power required for training AI models emits approximately 626,000 pounds (284 tonnes) of carbon dioxide, which is comparatively five times the lifetime emissions of the average US car.