Carbon Footprint Of A.I.? This Clever Tool Breaks It Down

Deep-learning A.I. is the machine learning technology that powers everything from cutting-edge natural language processing to machine vision tools. It may also be powering climate change -- as a result of the massive energy consumption and CO2 emissions associated with training these deep-learning models. As the use of deep learning has exploded, so has the compute power associated with them, although this effect is rarely studied. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Computer Science are working to change that, however. They've developed a tool called Carbontracker, which works out the energy consumption associated with deep-learning algorithms and then converts this into a prediction about CO2 emissions.