The bull thesis for artificial intelligence, spouted often by its creators, is quite simple: the technology, acting as a tool to be leveraged by humans, will lead to enormous advancements in science and medicine. It will speed up the creation of new medicine and could assist in the fight against climate change.
The risks pale in comparison to the rewards, according to the leaders of the AI revolution.
"We are working to build tools that one day could address some of humanity's biggest challenges," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a Senate hearing in May, adding the caveat that, "if this technology goes wrong, it could go quite wrong."
Related: Here's the Steep, Invisible Cost Of Using AI Models Like ChatGPT
The issue at hand is a diversion of focus. When citing potential threats of an out-of-control "Terminator"-esque super intelligent AI, it is easy to ignore the less dramatic harms of severe economic inequity, increased fraud and political instability.
And when citing opportunities to leverage this technology to solve climate change, certainly a positive possibility, it is easy to overlook the impact AI models have in perpetuating climate change.
The crux of this environmental threat revolves around one main concept: the data centers required to train and then run AI models like ChatGPT use a tremendous amount of electricity and water, emitting a huge — and unknown — amount of carbon dioxide in the process.
The birthplace of OpenAI's GPT-4
The data centers responsible for the creation of OpenAI's latest iteration of ChatGPT — GPT-4 — are located in Des Moines, Iowa. The location was ideal for the housing of a data center, which must maintain a certain temperature, because Iowa is cool enough for a large enough part of the year that Microsoft (MSFT) -) can use the outside air to keep its supercomputing data centers cool.
But when temperatures heat up, the center starts pumping in water to keep everything from overheating, according to AP News. Microsoft pumped 11.5 million gallons of water to its Iowa data centers during the month of July, 2022, just a few weeks before OpenAI said the training of GPT-4 was complete.
That amounted to 6% of all the water used in the district, according to the West Des Moines Water Works. The extra water usage was such a burden that the city now stipulates that it will not consider any future data center projects from Microsoft unless the company demonstrates that it has the technology to reduce its peak water usage.
Microsoft's global water usage spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 to around 1.7 billion gallons, according to the company's latest environmental report.
More Sam Altman:
- Meet Sam Altman, the man behind OpenAI's revolutionary ChatGPT
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- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's latest venture under fire for privacy concerns
The increase, Shaolei Ren, an AI researcher at the University of California, Riverside, told AP, is largely due to the company's "heavy investment in generative AI and partnership with OpenAI."
"Most people are not aware of the resource usage underlying ChatGPT,” Ren told AP. “If you’re not aware of the resource usage, then there’s no way that we can help conserve the resources.”
Microsoft, which has invested around $13 billion in OpenAI, told AP that it is working on improving the energy and water efficiency of its data centers.
Ren, in a paper to be published later in the year, estimates that ChatGPT uses around 500 milliliters of water for every five to 50 prompts it receives, depending on the season and the location of the servers, a variable that makes estimating the carbon footprint of these models incredibly difficult.
According to data from Similarweb, ChatGPT brought in 1.8 billion website visits in May, a number that has since dipped slightly.
"That's the dichotomy," Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher told TheStreet in June. "We could be doing great stuff for the climate with AI, which we are doing to some extent, but it's kind of being voided by these large language models and the amount of resources they need."
If you work for OpenAI or Microsoft, contact Ian by email ian.krietzberg@thearenagroup.net or Signal 732-804-1223
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