Artificial Intelligence Has a Huge Carbon Footprint. But It Doesn't Have To.

This piece has been published as part of Slate's partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. Artificial intelligence is getting smarter, but it isn't getting cleaner. In order to improve at predicting the weather, sorting your social media feeds, and hailing your Uber, it needs to train on massive datasets. A few years ago, an A.I. system might have required millions of words to attempt to learn a language, but today that same system could be processing 40 billion words as it trains, according to Roy Schwartz, who researches deep learning models at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and in the University of Washington's computer science and engineering department. All that processing takes a lot of energy.