“As video and image becomes more prominent and used by more and more people, we need the numbers from different modalities and how they measure up,” says Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at the AI platform Hugging Face.
This is also important because the figures for asking a question to a chatbot are, as expected, undoubtedly small—the same amount of electricity used by a microwave in just seconds. That’s part of the reason AI and climate researchers don’t suggest that any one individual’s AI use creates a significant climate burden.
A full accounting of AI’s energy demands—one that goes beyond what’s used to answer an individual query to help us understand its full net impact on the climate—would require application-specific information on how all this AI is being used.
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