Get the latest tech news
AI, but at What Cost? Breakdown of AI's Carbon Footprint
Is it efficient? Is it green? Far from it.
Amid the excitement and tech moguls' gold rush to the next model, have we stopped to consider the environmental cost of running these models—with their hundreds of billions of parameters—for hours on end, scaled across multiple instances, serving millions of users simultaneously? As a long-time advocate of the "minimal web" concept, I've noticed an oxymoron: On one hand, all of us are eager to run towards technological advancements (e.g. AI). Based on these calculations, services like Midjourney consume around 960,000 kWh per day, assuming each user executes one prompt per hour in average.
Or read this on Hacker News
