AI Has An Emission Problem: Is It Fixable?

According to Google Flights' estimate, a round trip of a fully loaded passenger jet between San Francisco and New York would release 180 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Meanwhile, the training emissions of Google's 11 billion parameter T5 language model and OpenAI's GPT-3(175 billion parameters) stands 26%, 305% of the round trip, respectively. The "state-of-the-art" models require a substantial amount of computational resources and energy, leading to high environmental costs. Deep learning models are getting larger by the day. Such large models are routinely trained for thousands of hours on specialised hardware accelerators in data centers.