{"id":3025,"date":"2025-06-22T10:00:45","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T10:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/ai-pollution-carbon-energy\/"},"modified":"2025-06-22T10:00:45","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T10:00:45","slug":"ai-pollution-carbon-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/ai-pollution-carbon-energy\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Just Found Something Unbelievably Grim About Pollution Generated by AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"AI<\/div>\n

Tech companies are hellbent on pushing out ever more advanced artificial intelligence models \u2014 but there appears to be a grim cost to that progress.<\/p>\n

In a new study<\/a> in the science journal Frontiers in Communication<\/em>, German researchers found that large language models (LLM) that provide more accurate answers use exponentially more energy \u2014 and hence produce more carbon \u2014 than their simpler and lower-performing peers.\u00a0In other words, the findings are a grim sign of things to come for the environmental impacts of the AI industry: the more accurate a model is, the higher its toll on the climate.<\/p>\n

“Everyone knows that as you increase model size, typically models become more capable, use more electricity and have more emissions,” Allen Institute for AI researcher Jesse Dodge, who didn’t work on the German research but has conducted similar analysis of his own, told the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The team examined 14 open source LLMs \u2014 they were unable to access the inner workings of commercial offerings like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude \u2014 of various sizes and fed them 500 multiple choice questions plus 500 “free-response questions.”<\/p>\n

Crunching the numbers, the researchers found that big,\u00a0more accurate models such as DeepSeek produce\u00a0the most carbon compared to chatbots with smaller digital brains. So-called “reasoning” chatbots,\u00a0which\u00a0break problems down into steps in their attempts to solve them, also produced markedly more emissions than their simpler brethren.<\/p>\n

There were occasional LLMs that bucked the trend \u2014 Cogito 70B achieved\u00a0slightly higher accuracy than DeepSeek, but with a modestly smaller carbon footprint, for instance \u2014 but the overall pattern was stark: the more reliable an AI’s outputs, the greater its environmental harm.<\/p>\n

“We don\u2019t always need the biggest, most heavily trained model, to answer simple questions,” Maximilian Dauner, a German doctoral student and lead author of the paper, told the NYT<\/em>. “Smaller models are also capable of doing specific things well. The goal should be to pick the right model for the right task.”<\/p>\n

That brings up an interesting point: do we really need AI in everything? When you go on Google, those annoying AI summaries<\/a> pop up, no doubt generating pollution for a result that you never asked for in the first place.<\/p>\n

Each individual query might not count for much, but when you add them all up, the effects on the climate could be immense. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, recently enthused<\/a> that a “significant fraction” of the Earth’s total power production should eventually go to AI.<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> CEOs Using AI to Terrorize Their Employees<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Scientists Just Found Something Unbelievably Grim About Pollution Generated by AI<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tech companies are hellbent on pushing out ever more advanced artificial intelligence models \u2014 but there appears to be a grim cost to that progress. In a new study in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[316,177,1907],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-artificial-intelligence","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}