Artificial intelligence can do some amazing things, but it also has a huge impact on our environment.
Leandro De Castro is the director of Florida Gulf Coast University’s AI Institute. He said ChatGPT requires a lot of computer processing, which creates a lot of heat. So, AI companies need to use water to cool their equipment down.
“This cooling down can be made either through fans or through the use of water. So, you need these resources also to cool down these systems to provide the energy required by AI," said De Castro.
Researchers at the University of California said it takes an entire water bottle worth of fresh water just to ask a few questions on ChatGPT.
ChatGPT has 200 million users per week, which means we're burning about 26.4 million gallons of water. That's enough water to fill Epcot's Spaceship Earth one and a half times, in just one week.
De Castro said the energy being used isn’t just when we give AI prompts. It's also for training the technology.
“AI requires a lot of energy. Most of this energy is used for training the models. That means to prepare the AI to be used by other people, but after it's trained, you also need to call all the functions and start using AI,” said De Castro.
AI also generates a lot of CO2. De Castro said about 500 metric tons were used to train one of the latest GPT models. That's the same amount of CO2 100 cars use in a year.
The good news is De Castro said AI is still learning and working on how to be better for the environment.
“You can design better algorithms that learn faster than learn in a way that requires less processing power to learn. That's an important thing. There are some very recent works showing ways of doing that,” said De Castro.