The rapid rise of artificial intelligence is having a dramatic impact on the environment, threatening to deprive humans of valuable resources amid the climate crisis.
About a quarter of Americans have used ChatGPT since the chatbot launched in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center – and each question has an environmental impact.
Use of chatbots a huge amount of energy to answer users’ questions, while keeping bot servers legal requires liters of water.
While the exact number of victims is nearly impossible to quantify, The Washington Post teamed up with researchers at the University of California, Riverside, to to determine how much water and energy OpenAI’s ChatGPT consumes, using the GPT-4 language model, to write a 100-word email.
According to calculations, for a 100-word response generated by an AI chatbot, using GPT-4, It takes 519 milliliters of water, a little more than a small bottle of water.
To lower the temperature
Every query on ChatGPT goes through a server that performs thousands of calculations to identify the most appropriate words to use in a response. As the servers complete these calculations, they generate heat.
Water systems are often used to cool equipment and keep it running. Water carries away the heat generated in data centers in cooling towers to remove heat from the building like this the human body uses sweat to cool itselfaccording to Shaolei Ren, associate professor at UC Riverside.
Even under ideal conditions, data centers are often among the biggest users of water, environmental activists say.
And with electricity bills increasing
Where electricity is cheaper, It is also used to cool facilities with large units that look like air conditioners, he said.
This means that the amount of water and electricity required for a specific query depends on the location of the data center and varies greatly.
But also data centers with electric cooling systemss increase residents’ electricity bills and overload the power grid.
Data centers also require huge amounts of energy to support other activities such as cloud computing, with artificial intelligence adding to that burden, Ren said.
Promises that are often not kept
In short, if a data center is located in a hot area—and relies on air conditioning for cooling—it will require a lot of electricity to keep the servers cool. If data centers that rely on water cooling are located in drought-prone areas, they risk depleting the area of the precious natural resource.
Big tech companies have often promised to make their data centers greener by using new cooling methods, but their commitments often go unfulfilled.
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