Will responsible AI neutralise tech carbon footprint?
data servers are humming, consuming both megawatts and precious natural resources to bring life to our digital world.
The planet's 8,000 or so data centers are the foundation of our online existence, and will grow ever further with the advent of artificial intelligence — so much so that research estimates that by 2025, the IT industry could use 20 percent of all electricity produced, and emit up to 5.5 percent of the world's carbon emissions.
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«Pandora's box is open,» said Arun Iyengar, CEO of Untether AI, a highly specialized chip-making company that strives to make AI more energy efficient.
«We can utilize AI in ways that enhance the climate requirements or we can ignore the climate requirements and find ourselves facing the consequences in a decade or so in terms of the impact.»
The transformation of the world's data servers to AI readiness is already well underway, in what one Google executive called a «once-in-a-generation inflection point in computing.»
But the scope of the mission is huge.
The creation of generative AI tools such as GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT, or Google's Palm2, behind the bot Bard, can be broken into two key stages, the actual «training» and then the execution (or
