Lifeboat Foundation

The explosive recent growth of AI tools to generate text, images, or audio relies on gargantuan amounts of information.

That information doesn’t come for free. It can exact high – and unequal – costs in terms of energy, water, and labor, though these costs are largely invisible to users.

In terms of energy, generative AI models typically depend on extremely large-scale cloud providers, which use chips with more transistors that require at least 10 times as much energy as traditional versions. Unsurprisingly, models that use more training data and contain more parameters tend to guzzle more energy.