Some AI Prompts Can Cause 50 Times More CO2 Emissions Than Others

A new study, published in Frontiers, aims to draw more attention to the issue. Researchers analyzed the number of "tokens"--the smallest units of data that a language model uses to process and generate text--required to produce responses, and found that certain prompts can release up to 50 times more CO2 emissions than others. Different AI models use a different number of parameters; those with more parameters often perform better. The study examined 14 large language models (LLMs) ranging from seven to 72 billion parameters, asking them the same 1,000 benchmark questions across a range of subjects. Parameters are the internal variables that a model learns during training, and then uses to produce results.