2020 BRN Discussion, page-285

Some AI researchers aren’t waiting for the industry to wake up. Luccioni of Mila helped organize a workshop on climate change last month at an important AI conference, NeurIPS, and she was pleased to find that the event was standing room only. “There’s a lot of interest in this,” she says.The Allen Institute for AI, a research institute founded by the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, has also called for greater awareness of AI’s environmental impact. The institute’s CEO, Oren Etzioni, says he is encouraged by the efforts of researchers, as many papers now include some account of the computational intensity of a particular algorithm or experiment.Etzioni adds that the industry as a whole is gradually waking up to energy efficiency. Even if this is largely because of the cost involved with training large AI models, it could help prevent AI from contributing to a looming climate catastrophe. “AI is clearly moving toward lighter models and greener AI,” he says.