Tech’s climate impact is scarier than any super-AI ‘terminator’

livemint.com:

Soaring daily temperatures, wildfires in Canada, inexplicably hot ocean currents—our worries around climate change have intensified. There is another fear out there this year, though mixed with frenzied excitement: the worry of whether we have created a Frankenstein’s monster in the quest for artificial intelligence (AI). My fears, however, are not as much about an AI agent becoming more intelligent than us, as two things more fundamental and immediate.

One is of this powerful technology being used by malevolent actors to influence elections and democracy by creating terabytes of fake news, or even building autonomous war weapons. The other worry, which is far less talked about, is how AI and generative AI can accelerate global warming and climate change. A lot has been written and talked about blockchain and cryptocurrency being an environmental disaster.

But so are AI and generative AI. There are three ways in which generative AI degrades the environment. One, training the gigantic generative AI models requires enormous amounts of energy, leading to vast carbon emissions.

As an example, training a 213 million generative AI model just once can spew out the same carbon emissions that 125 New York-Beijing round flight trips would! This is a small model, GPT3 is 800 times bigger with 175 billion parameters and GPT4 and Google’s Bard are possibly even larger. Besides, most of these models are trained multiple times for optimum accuracy. Two, most of these models live on the cloud; for instance, GPT is on Microsoft Azure.