Green AI
This is ultimately a silly and misguided proposal, which focuses on the costs and not benefits. There is nothing special about training an AI; it is simply another thing to spend resources on, no intrinsically worse or better than any other way. A biology experiment has &#x27;carbon footprint&#x27;. The ITER has a &#x27;carbon footprint&#x27; (and probably one orders of magnitude larger than all AI research this year). HN burns CO2. Everything uses energy or it uses things which require energy, like human labor, and they involve other costs like opportunity cost which are just as real and important. They stand or fall on their net merits, not how much electricity they use.<p>There is no need to go around criticizing people for &#x27;green AI&#x27; by myopically focusing solely on an abstract electrical cost of training. And if there is, then that applies to <i>everything</i> which uses electricity, and is better handled by putting a carbon tax on energy sources, and letting the market find the most unprofitable uses of energy (which will probably not be AI research, I&#x27;ll tell you that...) and stop it and substitute in more &#x27;green&#x27; power sources for everything else.<p>More importantly, if you are concerned about the costs of training AI, you should be concerned about the <i>total</i> costs as compared to the <i>total</i> benefits, not slicing out a completely arbitrary subset of costs and ranting about how many &#x27;cars&#x27; it is equivalent to (which is not even strictly true in the first place considering that many data centers are located near cheap and renewable power like hydropower or nuclear power plants!) and shrugging away the issue that people consider these performance gains important and well-worth paying for. There are costs to a model which is worse than it could be. There are costs to models which run slower at deployment time even if they are faster to train. There are costs to models which cannot be used for transfer learning (as the criticized language models excel at, incidentally). And so on. What matters are the <i>total</i> costs, and corporations and researchers already pay considerable attention to that already. (Not a single one of their metrics - &#x27;carbon emission&#x27;, &#x27;electricity usage&#x27;, &#x27;elapsed real time&#x27;, &#x27;number of parameters&#x27;, &#x27;FPO&#x27; - is an actual total cost!)