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How much electricity does AI consume?

How many watts and joules does it actually take to generate a single Balenciaga pope?

(Judy Priest, CTO for cloud operations and innovations at Microsoft said in an e-mail that the company is currently “investing in developing methodologies to quantify the energy use and carbon impact of AI while working on ways to make large systems more efficient, in both training and application.” OpenAI and Meta did not respond to requests for comment.) After a system is created, it’s rolled out to consumers who use it to generate output, a process known as “inference.” Last December, Luccioni and colleagues from Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University published a paper(currently awaiting peer review) that contained the first estimates of inference energy usage of various AI models. A recent report by the International Energy Agency offered similar estimates, suggesting that electricity usage by data centers will increase significantly in the near future thanks to the demands of AI and cryptocurrency.

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