Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionising industries and transforming the daily lives of many, but its environmental impact is a growing concern. On one hand, AI can contribute to environmental sustainability by optimising energy usage, improving resource management, and enabling more thoughtful agriculture practices. For instance, AI-driven systems can reduce energy consumption in buildings by predicting and adjusting heating and cooling needs, thus lowering carbon footprints.
However, developing and deploying AI models that give us generative AI, especially large-scale ones, comes with significant environmental costs. Training these models requires substantial computational power, leading to high energy consumption and increased greenhouse gas emissions. Data centres house the servers for AI operations and are major contributors to this energy usage. Efforts are being made to mitigate these impacts, such as using renewable energy sources for data centres and developing more energy-efficient algorithms.
The JISC has recently published a blog post worth reading – see Artificial intelligence and the environment: The current landscape.
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