
Training a single AI can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes - jasaloo
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613630/training-a-single-ai-model-can-emit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in-their-lifetimes/
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FlyingAvatar
"In particular, they found that a tuning process known as neural architecture
search, which tries to optimize a model by incrementally tweaking a neural
network’s design through exhaustive trial and error, had extraordinarily high
associated costs for little performance benefit."

This is specifically the ONE instance that uses five cars worth of CO2. The
next highest example used 435x less CO2. Click-bait titles like this incite
unnecessary ire.

If you're spending $1,000,000+ on cloud compute costs, you're (a) hopefully
very aware that this is burning a lot of CPU/GPU cycles, (b) very unlikely to
try it again if the gains are minimal as the paper states.

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jasaloo
I think the ire is necessary.

The article gives a fair range of the different _baseline_ operations and
their carbon footprint. Sure the title is provocative, but it’s accurate.

And even the operation that’s still “435x less” is just under the CO2
footprint of a passenger on a transatlantic flight. That’s not insignificant
at all.

The fact is that more industries are trying to get their hands on this tech,
and they won’t go about self-regulating the types of energy-intensive
operations they use if they think there’s profit at the end of it.

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jasaloo
“In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models.
They found that the process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon
dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average
American car (and that includes manufacture of the car itself).“

