Study reveals how much energy AI uses to answer your questions
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Whether it’s answering work emails or drafting wedding vows, generative artificial intelligence tools have become a trusty copilot in many people’s lives. But a growing body of research shows that for every problem AI solves, hidden environmental costs are racking up.
Each word in an AI prompt is broken down into clusters of numbers called “token IDs” and sent to massive data centers — some larger than football fields — powered by coal or natural gas plants. There, stacks of large computers generate responses through dozens of rapid calculations.
The whole process can take up to 10 times more energy to complete than a regular Google search, according to a frequently cited estimation by the Electric Power Research Institute.
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So, 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. Complex questions produced up to six times more carbon dioxide emissions than questions with concise answers.
In addition, “smarter” LLMs with more reasoning abilities produced up to 50 times more carbon emissions than simpler systems to answer the same question, the study reported.
“This shows us the tradeoff between energy consumption and the accuracy of model performance,” said Maximilian Dauner, a doctoral student at Hochschule Munchen University of Applied Sciences and first author of the Frontiers in Communication study published Wednesday.
Typically, these smarter, more energy intensive LLMs have tens of billions more parameters — the biases used for processing token IDs — than smaller, more concise models.
“You can think of it like a neural network in the brain. The more neuron connections, the more thinking you can do to answer a question,” Dauner said.
What you can do to reduce your carbon footprint
Complex questions require more energy in part because of the lengthy explanations many AI models are trained to provide, Dauner said. If you ask an AI chatbot to solve an algebra question for you, it may take you through the steps it took to find the answer, he said.
