The planet’s 8,000 or so data centers are the foundation of our online existence, and will grow ever further with the advent of artificial intelligence — so much so that research estimates that by 2025, the IT industry could use 20 percent of all electricity produced, and emit up to 5.5 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
“We can utilize AI in ways that enhance the climate requirements or we can ignore the climate requirements and find ourselves facing the consequences in a decade or so in terms of the impact.” A more recent study by Google and the University of California, Berkeley, reported that training GPT-3 resulted in 552 metric tons of carbon emissions, equivalent to driving a passenger vehicle 1.24 million miles .
Deployment doesn’t necessarily need the computing heft of a Nvidia chip, but taken cumulatively, the endless interactions in the real world far outweigh training in terms of workload. The mass deployment of AI and faster computing will in the end diminish the need to go to the world’s data clouds, he argued.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman meanwhile believes that AI will soon enough be able to build humanity a completely new future.