Creating an AI can be five times worse for the planet than a car

Training artificial intelligence is an energy intensive process. New estimates suggest that the carbon footprint of training a single AI is as much as 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – five times the lifetime emissions of an average car. Emma Strubell at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US and colleagues have assessed the energy consumption required to train four large neural networks, a type of AI used for processing language. Language-processing AIs underpin the algorithms that power Google Translate as well as OpenAI's GPT-2 text generator, which can convincingly pen fake news articles when given a few lines of text. These AIs are trained via deep learning, which involves processing vasts amounts of data. "In order to learn something as complex as language, the models have to be large," says Strubell.