Individual Queries vs. Aggregate Externalities

Mosharaf Chowdhury, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and Director of the ML Energy lab, and Dan Zhou, former Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Lincoln Lab, MIT Supercomputing Center, and MIT CSAIL, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the energy costs of AI. 

They break down exactly how much energy fuels a single ChatGPT query, why this is difficult to figure out, how we might improve energy efficiency, and what kinds of policies might minimize AI’s growing energy and environmental costs. 

Leo Wu provided excellent research assistance on this podcast.

Read more from Mosharaf:

• The ML Energy Initiative
• “We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard,” in MIT Technology Review

Read more from Dan:

• “From Words to Watts: Benchmarking the Energy Costs of Large Language Model Inference,” in Proc. IEEE High Perform. Extreme Comput. Conf. (HPEC)
• “A Green(er) World for A.I.,” in IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)

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