Three takeaways about AI's energy use and climate impacts

One key caveat here is that we don't know much about "closed source" models--for these, companies hold back the details of how they work. Instead, we worked with researchers who measured the energy it takes to run open-source AI models, for which the source code is publicly available. But using open-source models, it's possible to directly measure the energy used to respond to a query rather than just guess. We worked with researchers who generated text, images, and video and measured the energy required for the chips the models are based on to perform the task. Even just within the text responses, there was a pretty large range of energy needs.