Generative AI tools are increasingly integral in personal and professional tasks but come with substantial environmental costs. A study from Germany highlights that each AI prompt emits considerable carbon, with complex questions producing up to six times more emissions than simpler ones. Advanced AI models, designed for better reasoning, can increase carbon emissions by up to 50 times compared to their simpler counterparts. These findings emphasize a trade-off between energy consumption and AI accuracy, prompting a reevaluation of the environmental impact of AI technologies as their usage grows.
For each prompt you give AI, what's the damage? To find out, researchers in Germany tested 14 large language model (LLM) AI systems by asking them both free-response and multiple-choice questions.
This shows us the tradeoff between energy consumption and the accuracy of model performance, said Maximilian Dauner. Typically, smarter LLMs have tens of billions more parameters than smaller models.
Collection
[
|
...
]