ChatGPT now processes around 2.5 billion queries every day UN researchers are urging people to be less polite to artificial intelligences after a report found that cutting words from prompts could reduce ChatGPT's energy consumption by up to 25 per cent. Removing "please", "thank you" and other unnecessary words from AI prompts could save 87 to 98 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, the report from the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) found. That is the equivalent of the annual residential electricity use of up to 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa. 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day To reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint, people should write concise prompts, avoid getting sucked into conversation loops and refrain from starting relationships with AI, the researchers said. "We are not saying be rude to your AI. But don't fall into the interaction trap and don't go falling in love with it either," says Kaveh Madani at UNU-INWEH.

A data center for cryptocurrency mining, cloud services, and AI computing in Stutsman County, North Dakota.halbergman/Getty This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world's dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned. About 1 billion tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry's enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.

US Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world's dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned. About 1bn tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry's enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian. This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a "pause" of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK. The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

Innovation in IT got us to this point. Graphics processing units (GPUs) that power the computing behind AI have fallen in cost by 99% since 2006. There was similar concern about the energy use of data centers in the early 2010s, with wild projections of growth in electricity demand. But gains in computing power and energy efficiency not only proved these projections wrong but enabled a 550% increase in global computing capability from 2010 to 2018 with only minimal increases in energy use. In the late 2010s, however, the trends that had saved us began to break.

The world's electricity use will grow every year by more than the amount consumed annually by Japan because of a surge in electric transport, air conditioning and datacentres, according to the world's energy watchdog. The International Energy Agency has raised its predictions for the world's rising demand for electricity, pegging the growth at almost 4% a year until 2027, up from its previous forecast of 3.4% year. The influential Paris-based agency said the "new age of electricity" was dawning as a result of the climate crisis as more people begin to use air conditioning to cope with extreme temperature rises and economies begin to turn away from using fossil fuels in favour of cleaner power. More governments are taking steps to rely on electricity for transport and heating systems as well as heavy industry, according to the report, and there is also expected to be a rapid expansion of energy-hungry datacentres used to train artificial intelligence (AI). The forecasts are likely to stoke fears that the race to build more datacentres to support the boom in AI could become a drain on energy supplies, causing costs to rocket and stalling efforts to cut fossil fuels from power generation.

In Facebook's youth, most of the website was powered out of a single building in Prineville, Oregon. That data center, holding row upon row of refrigerator-size racks of servers filled with rows of silicon chips, consumed huge amounts of electricity, outstripping the yearly power usage of more than 6,000 American homes. One day in the summer of 2011, as reported in The Register, a Facebook exec received an alarming call: "There's a cloud in the data center … inside." Following an equipment malfunction, the building had become so hot and humid from all the electricity that actual rain, from a literal cloud, briefly drenched the digital one. Now Facebook, or rather Meta, operates well more than a dozen data centers, each much bigger and more powerful than the one in Prineville used to be.

In yet another step toward running its operations entirely on carbon-free energy sources by 2030, Google is now deploying machine learning technology that will help automatically shift workloads between data centers, depending on the availability of renewable energy resources, which can vary by type, location or the time of day. The move is part of Google's plan to transition to what it calls Carbon-Intelligent Compute Management, a system that will use artificial intelligence to automatically maximize clean electricity use across their data centers -- and therefore minimize the carbon footprint and operational costs. The system functions by delaying non-urgent workloads that aren't time-sensitive, such as encoding and analyzing videos that are uploaded to YouTube, or processing images that are uploaded to Google Photos and Drive. The company says that these "temporally flexible" tasks will still be completed within 24 hours, while critical production tasks and user-facing services that need to run around the clock -- such as Search, Maps, YouTube and cloud customers' workloads running in allocated Virtual Machines (VMs) -- will not be changed by the new system. "Workloads are comprised of compute jobs," explained the team of Google engineers in their recent paper on the new platform.

David Devereaux-Weber uses the Sense home energy monitor app to show the spike in electricity use when turning on the coffee maker in his Madison home. The coffee maker uses about 1 kilowatt of electricity, represented by the largest red circle on the tablet. David Devereaux-Weber installed a Sense home-energy monitor to find potential "energy hogs" in his Madison home. An ongoing study by Alliant Energy using the monitors found the average Wisconsin household could save $90 a year by targeting "always on" electronics. Most Wisconsin households could save $90 a year and slash energy use by selectively unplugging devices that draw power even when not in use, according to a study by Alliant Energy.

Sense is a bright-orange box that sits in your electrical breaker box and gives in-depth insight into your home's entire power usage. The whole system is quite clever and--thankfully--free of any monthly charges. But it learns very slowly, and that's likely to frustrate you. Sense ($299 at Amazon) works by electromagnetically listening to the power flowing along the two hot wires that run from your electric meter to your breakers. By measuring the current flow a million times each second, Sense can observe changes in load with precise detail and, based on a machine-learning database, attempt to identify the footprint of different devices from the noise they generate. This means it can tell you exactly how much energy different appliances in your house use, and it does all of this without requiring sensors or smart plugs on each device.

PointGrab is an Israel based business that offers a platform which includes an image sensing a cloud and hardware unit management program called CogniPoint, which they say might help building maintenance managers reduce operational costs by using AI to automate as well as enhance facility management. PointGrab claims computer users can integrate the CogniPoint formula of theirs into current building automation systems. Furthermore the Cognipoint sensor is actually installed to certain rooms in the structure to monitor the amount of occupants. The sensor could be hooked up to the buildings' present local area network (LAN), Power over Ethernet (POE) or perhaps WiFi connections. The company claims each of the sensor products of theirs are able to cover up to forty eight square meters (or maybe 520 sq ft).