The energy demand of generative artificial intelligence “is accelerating the climate crisis,” warns a prominent researcher about the environmental impact of Google's new search feature.
Sasha Luccioni invites us to adopt the concept of "energy sobriety."
Generative artificial intelligence, known for its high energy consumption due to the powerful computing required to train models and process tasks, is raising concerns about its environmental impact, which includes increasing carbon emissions and resource depletion. In a recent talk at the ALL IN artificial intelligence conference in Montreal, prominent Canadian scientist Sasha Luccioni, an expert on the environmental impact of AI, expressed her disappointment with the use of this technology for internet searches, highlighting the energy cost involved in tasks that could be performed by traditional search engines.
Unlike conventional search engines that simply retrieve existing information, AI models generate new content, which increases the computational power requirement as they are trained on billions of data points. One example is Google's AI Overview feature, which provides AI-generated summaries from multiple sources in response to complex queries.
Luccioni warned about the acceleration of the climate crisis that this represents and advocated for greater transparency from tech companies, urging governments to legislate more effectively once such transparency is achieved. Recognized by Time magazine in 2024 as one of the 100 most influential figures in AI, Luccioni was the co-creator of "CodeCarbon," a tool that allows developers to measure the carbon footprint of their code, which has been downloaded over a million times. She is currently working on a certification system to label AI models based on their energy efficiency, similar to the energy consumption ratings of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. For the same type of task, energy efficiency can be measured and models can be classified with ratings such as A+ or D.
Though some may consider her anti-AI, Luccioni emphasizes that her focus is on promoting "energy sobriety," urging users to use artificial intelligence technologies more consciously and efficiently.
