Generative AI is an energy hog. Is the tech worth the environmental cost?

It might seem like magic. Type a request into ChatGPT, click a button and — presto! — here’s a five-paragraph analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and, as an added bonus, it’s written in iambic pentameter. Or tell DALL-E about the chimeric animal from your dream, and out comes an image of a gecko-wolf-starfish hybrid. If you’re feeling down, call up the digital “ghost” of your deceased grandmother and receive some comfort (SN: 6/15/24, p. 10).

Despite how it may appear, none of this materializes out of thin air. Every interaction with a chatbot or other generative AI system funnels through wires and cables to a data center — a warehouse

→ Continue reading at Science News

More from author

Related posts

Advertisment

Latest posts

At Age 15, He Used Facebook Marketplace to Start a Side Hustle — Then It Became Something Much Bigger: ‘Raised Over $1.6 Million’

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Dylan Zajac, 21, a senior at Babson College. At 15, Zajac had a side hustle thrifting and fixing...

Rupert Murdoch loses bid to change family trust | CNN Business

CNN  —  Rupert Murdoch cannot amend his family trust to put the power of his media companies in...

OpenAI Just Released Its Text-to-Video Generator, Sora. Here’s How the New AI Could Impact Small Businesses and Creators.

OpenAI has added a new Sora video generator to ChatGPT that can create videos from text, animate images, and convert existing videos to new...