At the risk of being a “Debbie Downer” (whomp, whomp!), here’s another genAI challenge: generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring.

You won’t see this covered in tech publications – instead, it’s covered in Nature (Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret, written by Kate Crawford and available here). Apparently, last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis.

At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.

And it’s not just energy. Generative AI systems need enormous amounts of fresh water to cool their processors and generate electricity. In West Des Moines, Iowa, a giant data-center cluster serves OpenAI’s most advanced model, GPT-4. A lawsuit by local residents revealed that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI finished training the model, the cluster used about 6% of the district’s water. As Google and Microsoft prepared their Bard and Bing large language models, both had major spikes in water use — increases of 20% and 34%, respectively, in one year, according to the companies’ environmental reports.

As Crawford notes: “I’ve seen consistent downplaying and denial about the AI industry’s environmental costs since I started publishing about them in 2018. Altman’s admission has got researchers, regulators and industry titans talking about the environmental impact of generative AI.”

So what energy breakthrough is Altman banking on? Not the design and deployment of more sustainable AI systems — but nuclear fusion.

Say what? Wasn’t nuclear fusion a plot line in the 1997 movie The Saint, starring Val Kilmer and Elisabeth Shue?

OK, maybe it was cold fusion, but I’m not sure I see the difference – it’s all confusion to me. Regardless, Altman has his bases covered there – he started investing in fusion company Helion Energy in Everett, Washington in 2021.

As Crawford notes: “Most experts agree that nuclear fusion won’t contribute significantly to the crucial goal of decarbonizing by mid-century to combat the climate crisis. Helion’s most optimistic estimate is that by 2029 it will produce enough energy to power 40,000 average US households; one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.”

Crawford goes on to discuss some of the challenges and potential solutions. And she also references the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024, which directs the National Institute for Standards and Technology to collaborate with academia, industry and civil society to establish standards for assessing AI’s environmental impact, and to create a voluntary reporting framework for AI developers and operators. Of course, she also notes: “Whether the legislation will pass remains uncertain.” Alas.

One more challenge to overcome for generative AI to reach its potential. Whomp, whomp!

So, what do you think? Are you concerned that generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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