AI is an energy hog. This is what it means for climate change.

As AI has become more integrated into our world, I've gotten a lot of questions about the technology's rising electricity demand. You may have seen the headlines proclaiming that AI uses as much electricity as small countries, that it'll usher in a fossil-fuel resurgence, and that it's already challenging the grid. So how worried should we be about AI's electricity demands? Using AI for certain tasks can come with a significant energy price tag. With some powerful AI models, generating an image can require as much energy as charging up your phone, as my colleague Melissa Heikkilä explained in a story from December.