MIT moves toward greener, more sustainable artificial intelligence

While current artificial intelligence (AI) technology holds strategic and transformative potential, it isn't always environmentally-friendly due to high energy consumption. To the rescue are researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who have devised a solution that not only lowers costs but, more importantly, reduces the AI model training's carbon footprint. Back in June 2019, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst revealed that the amount of energy utilized in AI model training equaled 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. Contemporary AI isn't just run on a personal laptop or simple server. Rather, deep neural networks are deployed on diverse arrays of specialized hardware platforms. The level of energy consumption required to power such AI technologies is approximately five times the lifetime carbon emissions from an average American car, including its manufacturing.