The Enormous Amounts Of Power Ai Needs May Become The Biggest Obstacle To Its Growth

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought with it a spike in carbon emissions, as the creation of chatbots and image generators demands vast amounts of electricity. Major players like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI use cloud computing in massive data centres globally to train AI algorithms, known as models. To stay up to date and exploit AI’s capabilities, producing more – and more powerful – chips is key. Current industry standards and best practices for measuring and reporting the carbon footprint of AI and chatbot technologies are being developed, with AI startup Hugging Face developing a method to estimate the broader carbon footprint of large language models (LLMs) throughout their entire life cycle.