ChatGPT and other AI applications such as Midjourney have pushed “Artificial Intelligence” high on the hype cycle. In this article, I want to focus specifically on the energy cost of training and using applications like ChatGPT, what their widespread adoption could mean for global CO₂ emissions, and what we could do to limit these emissions.

Key points

• Training of large AI models is not the problem
• Large-scale use of large AI models would be unsustainable
• Renewables are not making AI more sustainable

The enormous energy requirement of these brute force statistical models is due to the following attributes:

• Requires millions or billions of training examples
• Requires many training cycles
• Requires retraining when presented with new information
• Requires many weights and lots of multiplication

ChatGPT and other AI applications such as Midjourney have pushed “Artificial Intelligence” high on the hype cycle. In this article, I want to focus specifically on the energy cost of training and using applications like ChatGPT, what their widespread adoption could mean for global CO₂ emissions, and what we could do to limit these emissions.

Key points

• Training of large AI models is not the problem
• Large-scale use of large AI models would be unsustainable
• Renewables are not making AI more sustainable