UNESCO: AI energy demand doubles every 100 days

Energy demand of artificial intelligence doubles every 100 days as that these tools become an integral part of life every day. This is the calculation made by UNESCO in a study presented at the AI ​​Global Summit, where the organization of the United Nations calls for shorter questions to be asked of these systems to reduce its energy footprint. "The exponential growth of computational power necessary to run these models - warns the study - is placing increasing pressure on energy systems global concerns about water resources and critical minerals, raising concerns about environmental sustainability, equitable access and on competition for limited resources." A combination of shorter requests and the use of smaller and more specific models could reduce consumption of artificial intelligence energy up to 90% without sacrifice performance, says UNESCO. To date, in fact, many AI models like ChatGpt are generic and designed to meet a wide variety of arguments, which means they have to sift through an immense volume of information to formulate and evaluate responses. The analysis highlights that it would be useful for the reduction of energy consumption also a cut in suggestions to chatbots 300 to 150 words. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently revealed that Each request sent to ChatGpt consumes an average of 0.34 Wh of power. electricity, or between 10 and 70 times a Google search. Approximately one billion requests per day equal 310 GWh per year, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of three millions of people in Ethiopia.