With every major tech firm integrating AI extensively into their product lines, the consequences of the power consumption needed to operate prompts are starting to become apparent as the field of artificial intelligence continues to advance at an unstoppable pace.
For the most of the past several months, Google has been releasing Gemini to all of its products and defending its AI Overviews, which incorrectly advised people to eat rocks or put glue on pizza. But it appears that the company's significant AI effort has had a significant impact on its climate footprint goals.
Google said yesterday that its "extremely ambitious" aim of attaining net zero emissions by 2030 "won't be easy" and that its greenhouse gas emissions had increased by 48% as a result of energy usage from its data centers.
The International Energy Agency has indicated that Google's power use may double from 2022 levels as well, as reported by The Guardian. Nevertheless, this increase may only be the beginning.
Why Google's emissions are rising
Google is making significant investments in infrastructure, technologies, and resources to reduce its emissions, but these efforts are being hampered by the energy-intensive training and operation of artificial intelligence models in data centers.
According to a research conducted last year by the AI firm Hugging Face, the energy required to create an AI image is equivalent to that required to completely charge a smartphone, and the first model training incurs much greater emissions.
In order to train the Large Language Model (LLM) that powers its Gemini Chatbot, Google has partnered with sites like Reddit. Meanwhile, its DeepMind research division is still working on generative AI, which can add sounds to silent movies and summarize other AI presentations.
And it's not just Google. Microsoft is pushing AI research ahead of its own emissions objectives. Sam Altman of OpenAI appears to have verified in May of this year that the business will need $520 million in funding to fund operations in 2023.
Hence, neither the advancement of AI nor the amount of pollutants produced appear to be slowing down. As Bill Gates stated to Sky News last week, let's hope that investing in AI can ultimately balance things out in terms of technology to address the climate catastrophe.