How big is AI's carbon footprint? | BBC News

you're watching the context it's time for our weekly regular segment AI decoded welcome to Aid decoded every week in this program we take you deep into the world of artificial intelligence and what we've tried to do is focus these programs on one particular theme so last week we looked at the advance of AI on the battlefield tonight we're going to consider something a number of you have raised and that is AI and energy or more specifically the energy that AI consumes there are climate experts who are warning that the advance of artificial intelligence could lead to an 80% increase in our Global carbon emissions well let's start with sustainability because that cloud that AI models live on is actually made out of metal plastic and powered by vast amounts of energy and each time you query an AI model it comes with a cost to the planet that is Sasha luch lead climate researcher at the AI company hugging face she's going to be joining us from Montreal in just a moment how much energy are we using while according to this report from Vox AI is already consuming as much energy as a small country and we are only at the beginning the next web says this is where our two existential crises collide with one another climate crisis and the exponential growth of AI can one help solve the other or will it exac acate the problem here in the studio our regular AI contributor PRI Lani CEO of the AI powered education company Century T welcome good to see you right look when it comes to digital everybody knows there is a cost there's the wiring there's the chips there's the precious metals there's the water that cools the data processing centers what we often don't don't talk about is the energy that goes into producing Ai and specifically the training of AI language models like chat GPT yeah why because they're far more hungry than what we've seen before so you have these AI models that you and I have talked about we've shown we've played with right these air models are trained and they're deployed in data centers and the data centers consume vast amounts of electricity so if you are powering the data center with non-renewable sources then essentially you have potentially huge carbon emissions and those particular models that we're talking about these generative AI models not just language models right not just llm in terms of chat models but also the multimodal models images videos consume an enormous amount so if you remember in about 2019 we used to say if you stream an hour of video right it was 36 grams of CO2 just to put that into context for everyone because that's why we're here okay that's driving a car typical kind of petrol car about 160 m now meta they just released llama 3 on hugging face one of my favorite platforms okay and that model they said um emitted about 2, 290 metric tons of CO2 and so you're going to say put that into context that's about 500 average cars and what they Adit in an entire year so you start to get what we had with digital which is what you asked all the way to these really huge AI models and I just want to show you uh Christian what I looked at a little bit earlier before I came in so I just spent I just looked at half an hour of the images produced on Mid Journey so this is mid Journey that you're seeing now okay so you've got about 10 unique images that have been produced by this particular platform and that was about half an hour about 4:30 p.m. UK time today okay just those images and that's just on one channel of where you can find mid Journey okay one there are there are lots hundreds and hundreds but just those 10 alone would take about two and a half times the battery charge of a phone so this is a significant problem and if anyone's interested there are some great interviews actually with Mark Zuckerberg and others that say that this is there is going to be an energy Bott neck right and obviously for activists this is a significant problem so I'm really looking forward to having Sasha on to discuss this with her well let's bring her in Sasha lney uh she is the lead climate researcher at hugging face uh which priet really likes and she spent nearly a decade looking at data storage and machine learning and how this all contributes to our energy consumption welcome to the program thank you for having me right before we before we get started maybe I could just frame our conversation with an image that you sent us actually that that for me really underlines just how expensive our digital usage has become so here is Google's annual energy use 18.3 trillion Watts that's 10 or 15% of that is going towards Ai and here's what the Republic of Ireland uses in any one year 29.3 trillion wat so one company Sasha is now consuming about 2third of what a small country uses each year and yet I don't hear governments talking about that problem I think it's because uh AI is really a a horizontal it's not like your typical vertical like agriculture transportation and it actually affects all Industries anything that uses AI anything from navigation to web search and so I think governments don't really know what bucket to put it in and when you don't know what bucket it goes in you tend to kind of let it slip through the cracks and Sasha can you describe this in terms of the scale of large language models so what their usage is like and actually tell us what therefore that means in terms of energy consumption and the impact on the environment definitely language models have become one of the most popular usages of AI and they're being deployed in everything nowadays you can talk to to your stove or your fridge and uh in a recent study we did we found that so training a large language model is definitely very uh energy intensive and that's the the numbers that you gave but actually each query also uses energy and depending on the size of the model 200 to 500 million queries will equal the amount of energy used for training so it might seem like a lot but uh for chat GPT it it it averages around 10 million users a day so within a couple of weeks you have this vast amount of energy that you know is equivalent to all these cars over a year but just with people using the tool did you see this story this week um that microsof Microsoft are going to plow in about a hundred billion dollars into this super computer called Stargate um and it's going to be powered by not one they say not one but several nuclear power stations and and that got me thinking because I I have heard Sam Alman at at chat gbt talk about this open AI he's talked about this and he he says yeah that that's how we're going to have to work we're going to have to create our own Energy Systems is that is that perhaps where new energy comes from these the biggest companies in the world driving the investment well I mean it is it is a problem because to what extent do you want big tech companies to be building their own nuclear reactors and um maybe that energy can be better used used uh for other things right because we should be decarbonizing our energy globally and currently if we're going to funnel all that investment into the energy use for AI maybe other sectors will get overlooked and we should be focusing on those if we really want to decarbonize and Sasha what I'm quite excited about is look when we talk about AI models and I was on hugging face today so for those who don't know what it is it's an AI model repository and playing with llama 3 I like the fact that models now have a description potentially of you know how much energy they have used you've produced something pretty novel at hugging face haven't you so um when you're when you're building these AI models we're focused on the latency the speed of the model and how performant the model is but you're potentially creating a like a little trip advisor of how efficient it is so tell us about that yeah currently when people go on hugging phas they tend to shop around a little bit for models that work for their for the task that they want to do it could be language it could be it could be audio it could be image generation now we're even looking at video and typically they'll look at things like performance or latency but I'm calculating the energy usage across all different tasks and models on on the Hub on the hugging hugging face website and I want to provide that information to people so that they can Factor it in so maybe this model uh is not only faster but it's more efficient maybe this model is slightly less performant but it's vastly more efficient so I'm I'm develop en I'm developing energy star ratings for AI models well listen since we're talking about how we mitigate the problem let me introduce you to Chris starky because he is the CEO of the London Bay startup next Jen cloud and they been in business since 2020 and they Source data centers that are entirely powered by renewable energy welcome Chris to the program tell us what you do and how your clients would typically work well I mean so I mean we're on the other side of the fence where our business is all about building you know large scale um GPU clusters basically H we've got a core focus on building high density accelerate accelerated compute basically this is typically what companies um maybe that use hugging face or companies that are using uh or building their their own foundational models this is the type of infrastructure that they would be uh consuming um and our mission effectively is to deliver this at scale 100% renewably powered and Chris how do we achieve this sort of optimization of models because there's all sorts of things that we could be looking at so we're looking at infrastructure efficiency uh that I know you look at in terms of cooling Technologies I'd love to hear more about that and then also the optimized um Hardware the say for example Nvidia brought out the black wellpath platform and what they say with Blackwell is that it reduced the costs and energy consumption by about 25x for tech companies so can you describe these sorts of methodologies you know how Reliant we are on these and when we talk about cooling methodologies can you explain that to us you know we know that data centers and we know that these racks need cooling but it would be really great if you can walk the audience of the process how long have we got um I'm not too sure how how long we've got but uh not long so so I a short high level I mean you know only a few years ago you know we were building um high performance environments that you know maybe 10 to to 20 kilowatts um was was was deemed as kind of high dense um and uh you know now quite commonly we're building out um you know environments that are 50 to 60 kilowatt per rack um and the new iteration the next generation of chips um and some of the infrastructure you know that that we're bringing into play for next year 2025 you know we're going to be north of 120 kilowatts per act so you know we're seeing a a clear you know uh increase in exponential growth in density um and you know that that's great we can fit more power into Data Centers but you know the the the data centers will eventually be drawing a huge amount of resource a huge amount of energy so it's it's just unsustained able to to have traditional techniques of calling like air coing which is quite common now um so you know we've got a keen focus on on you know triing and testing new ways to cool the chips um one of the new ways um is something called you know liquid cool direct to chip um this brings a huge amount of efficiency but at the same time you know as chips get more powerful you know we're we're obviously drawing a huge amount more power you know per square feet or if you like or per square foot in each dat Center so you know yeah St no I'm just going to say because we're really pressed for time but I just want to get a really quick final answer from both of you maybe you could chip in on this um pardon the P um what about sovereignty because everybody wants control of their own computers and and obviously some of that's going to come down to where the cloud is what energy they have what energy they can generate if we're going to make this available to everybody how concerned are you both by that Sasha let me start with you first I feel that AI is really uh slipping through the cracks when it comes to accounting for energy and carbon because it's often companies in one country using cloud comput in another country and often the the for example every time I talk to Cloud providers they like we don't know what's running on our centers we it could be streaming it could be AI so it's really hard for them to count uh to to account for this energy usage so every time I'm like okay give me a number they're like we don't have any numbers so I've seen that uh it's currently not being accounted for let's say yeah Chris yeah I mean well I mean if they if they're trying to do it sustainably I think a lot of you know countries will will struggle you know they they they absolutely will there's just not enough infrastructure you know locally to to to provide sustainable infrastructure not at the scale of the demand that we're seeing currently every country is going to want a sovereign Cloud they're all absolutely going for it right now everyone wants their own Sovereign gbt for example um they're not going to be able to do it currently certainly not here in the UK I do not think no I'm PR was just saying everybody wants a super computer every wants a super computer also as well I mean you know I just thinking back to G20 you know when when you you know to to to the the climate conferences and and and you know when people talk about carbon Footprints and and what belongs to that carbon footprint we talk about emissions but we never talk about Cloud power or or generating comp you know computer generating it's the length of time that will take for Supply to to create these renewable energy you know data centers 100% to the demand think about how quick it was that chat GPT exploded right amazing Sasha Lon Chris starky amazing stuff thank you for being with us here on AI deoda come back soon after the break Pria will guide us through some of the big stories of the week anyone seen the ad for the new Apple iPad not everyone's cup of tea and I'll show you a biopic on President Putin made entirely back by Ai and how long before we can speak to the animals we'll be right back you're watching AI decoded now the new ad for the AI powered iPad has spot quite the backlash among Hollywood creatives uh why we will find out because it's uh probably something to do with this the fact that you can create an entire movie now without auditioning someone who looks like the Russian president this is the AI generated President Putin a biopic the guardian says will be out for release in September uh if you can reproduce Vladimir Putin then it stands to reason you can recreate anyone there's a story here from the times that reports there's been a surge in dead Bots or grief Bots families using AI to bring their loved ones back to life but does it require tighter regulation and how long before we can understand what the animals are saying scientists have spoken to Sky News and they say they think AI will one day help them communicate with a sperm well uh Dr doitt I presume let's start with uh this huge sensitivity forer that there is within the creative arts industry um you know about about what AI is doing replacing Talent destroying The Human Experience of playing an instrument or writing a song and so with that in mind let me just play you the new ad from apple and we'll talk about it off the B when I'm down and all alone All I Ever Need is [Music] You wi they and we watch the M SN oh yeah it's called Crush um imagine all the things that it'll uh be used to uh to create Apple CEO Tim Cook said let me just uh that it'll uh obviously revolutionize uh the Arts industry but let me just read you this from Asif capadia who is a a writer and director she said I don't know why anyone thought this AB was a good idea it's the most honest metaphor she says for what tech companies do to the Arts to musicians creators writers filmmakers squeeze them use them not pay well take everything and that's the point right we've talked about this on the program before yeah a bit insensitive isn't it it's insensitive I think obviously there's a lot of anger because of two reasons there the threat that AI poses but then also it's just this idea that Tech really misunderstands the art and the fact that you know what's Technology's role going to be in diminishing artistic and cultural mediums right but what's what's really interesting and I think there's a really funny video do you want to play and just it would take literally 30 seconds on actually what one director created in response to Apple's um adverts and I don't know if we can get that up right now but it was a filmmaker who reversed it and essentially um described that you know was it was it was a very very good quality video and it was essentially all of the Arts all the instruments crushing the iPad and it was the reverse of that but you know why do I not think that this is an actual threat okay because instruments are not just tools right your guitar your piano that's a tactile that's an immersive experience I've got a nickon DSR um DSLR it enables me to have that sort of artistic creativity when I'm taking a picture right which you know an iPad as great as it is and I love my iPad but it's not able to do and then when it comes to painting and drawing for example you've got these artists that use you know different physical mediums like oils and acrylics it's not just all about that digital photo but it was incredibly insensitive I think an apple people are wondering what what the movies of the future might look like uh and what it might do to the Cinematic Arts in particular um maybe you should have a quick look at this this is the new AI biopic it give you an idea entirely created by artificial intelligence the president has found time for you after all this will culminate Nuclear Strike only I can save you and your family from prison Vladimir Putin has won with 5344 of the votes it's an embarrassing result what would have been the satisfactory result for you Mr President 100 you interesting thing about that and this is what panics people in Hollywood is that you don't need auditions for people that look like Putin you can create Putin they've got a Bill Clinton in there looks well it's Bill Clinton I mean then there might be an issue over that I mean absolutely in terms of obviously your image rights right and I think that's obviously we talked about the legal issues before but I mean you can do this at low cost with this sort of Technology now right you don't have to deal with the egos necessarily right that you might otherwise have to but there are huge ethical concerns with this not just because it's easy to talk about that being Putin I think a lot of the world would say oh that's fine but actually you're starting to potentially blur the lines between between reality and fiction you can misrepresent in many ways I mean you do question why they didn't just have an actor in The biopic this is clearly just about using that technology but I know there's so much more to come in the future when we talk about deep FES um and whether they're a good use or a bad use but you know clearly if this was if you if was of rishy sunak kissed armor then it it would be people would be up in arms about it yeah it takes on a much greater effect doesn't it when it looks specifically like them exactly um look the best story of the week is this story uh about sperm whales we've known for some time of course that their calls and their clicks are highly sophisticated to coordinate and communicate with one another but what if there is actually a language and these scientists that have been studying the Welles in the Eastern Caribbean found that they use mors code with a a rhythm or sort of tempo that suggests that there is some sort of meaning behind it and that's where potentially AI comes in yeah how how all right okay so when you're looking at language okay we map language we map the words like imagine creating a map of all the words okay and where they are on this map and then you calculate essentially the statistical difference between words okay and this is how you end up with these large language models and you look at similarities between words okay and so here what they're looking at is when they've got these clicks they're looking simplistically for patterns between those clicks and then they're actually recording what the whales are doing and then finding how those patterns might relate to diving really deep right or coming up or feeding and then they're attaching essentially those patterns in and creating this map and this language and then there will be an exercise where they'll try and essentially overlay that with the English language the test is right when they hear these clicks because they're really loud by the way so if you watch videos on on these whales they're they're super loud right um but when they hear those clicks can the AO model that they then create predict what the whale is going to do and then that's how you constantly then test and if that works then you can extend that a bit further and you can then start to create the language and talk back to it exactly what people want to do is potentially talk to their pets the this does raise huge ethical issues in terms of how we are interacting with animals and whether we should should you I don't want to be asked for a biscuit every five minutes absolutely not but I've talk to the whales I don't want my dog to tell me that it prefers my husband to me that's I the worst one yeah exactly but the thing is so so obviously I think there's a lot we can learn as well um but there's going to be huge questions about this but lots of people working on bats whales elephants and the Ft has done a fantastic podcast on it and I suggest you listen to it oh go have listen to that it's a great story uh congratulations to Sky News who actually picked that up with the scientists uh it's a really good one though um that's it from us we're out of time we'll do this again same time next week just before we go let me remind you that all the programs that we do are on uh the BBC's YouTube channel uh all the big interviews lots of good people coming on this program now so if you want to look back at previous episodes go and have a look at that

Channel: BBC News

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Keywords: bbc, bbc news, news, world news, breaking news, us news, world, america, usa, usa news, india news

Id: fjNacsyp28s

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024