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Reporting electricity consumption is essential for sustainable AI

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 5, pages 1176–1178 (2023)Cite this article

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The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has relied on an increasing demand for energy, which threatens to outweigh its promised positive effects. To steer AI onto a more sustainable path, quantifying and comparing its energy consumption is key.

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Fig. 1: Changes in the number of FLOPs needed for state-of-the-art AI model training procedures over time.
Fig. 2: Estimated CO2 emissions from common producers and deep learning models.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Steinbuch Centre for Computing, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

    Charlotte Debus, Achim Streit & Markus Götz

  2. Institute of Computational Biology, Helmholtz Zentrum München–German Research Center for Environmental Health, Munich, Germany

    Marie Piraud & Fabian Theis

  3. Helmholtz AI, Munich, Germany

    Marie Piraud, Fabian Theis & Markus Götz

Authors
  1. Charlotte Debus
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  2. Marie Piraud
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  3. Achim Streit
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  4. Fabian Theis
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  5. Markus Götz
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Correspondence to Charlotte Debus.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Felix Creutzig and Yiyu Shi for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Debus, C., Piraud, M., Streit, A. et al. Reporting electricity consumption is essential for sustainable AI. Nat Mach Intell 5, 1176–1178 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-023-00750-1

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