Training advanced AI models results in the production of surprising quantity of carbon dioxide, thus posing a threat to the environment, according to the researchers from the Massachusetts University.
According to a calculation by the magazine MIT Technology Review, the process emits carbon emission which is equal to 5 lifetime emissions of an average American vehicle. Well, this is more than 600,000 pounds of carbon emission- pretty equal to flying to London from New York and back each week for almost 3 years.
This goes without saying that such amount of carbon footprint has an unexpected expense to the planet’s environment. The researchers discovered that the computational costs as well as the environmental impact increased simultaneously as and when the size of AI models increased. In fact, the real impact of this process may be even more worse.
Training just a single AI model is the least amount of work that one can do, says the lead author of the study, Emma Strubell, a PhD candidate at the university. A new AI model would most likely need further rounds of training and tuning.
However, what they did not imagine is the extent of the impact till the time they witnessed such comparisons, said Siva Reddy from the Stanford University to MIT Tech.
