Opinion: AI is an energy-guzzler. We need to re-think its design, and soon The Mandarin

There is a saying that has emerged among the tech set in recent years: AI is the new electricity. The platitude refers to the disruptive power of artificial intelligence for driving advances in everything from transportation to predicting the weather. Of course, the computers and data centers that support AI's complex algorithms are very much dependent on electricity. While that may seem pretty obvious, it may be surprising to learn that AI can be extremely power-hungry, especially when it comes to training the models that enable machines to recognise your face in a photo or for Alexa to understand a voice command. The scale of the problem is difficult to measure, but there have been some attempts to put hard numbers on the environmental cost.