AI's Measurement Problem
Another part of the issue is that we don't actually know how much of this energy problem can be attributed to AI directly. The industry has struggled to establish effective benchmarks to compare models, and firms aren’t releasing data on their models’ carbon footprints, electricity use, or water consumption.
“There is very little transparency,” Krintz says. “Nobody wants to reveal their data. But we cannot solve any of these problems—we cannot understand these problems, we cannot speak about these problems—unless we measure.”