This week, I spoke with Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face, whose recent paper Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment? offers the first systematic comparison of the ongoing inference costs of various categories of machine learning systems. I wanted to speak with her about the energy cost of AI training and deployment, but also to go into the question of real AI risks, which was the topic of her TED Talk a couple of months ago.
In our conversation, Sasha and I cover…
The energy consumption and carbon impact of AI models — why this is, and how researchers have gone about measuring it?
Evaluating the tangible impacts of AI, and how existential risks hurt our chances of addressing the ongoing risks of AI deployment.
The concentration of power in AI research and the increasing influence of industry on the field — and how the divide between GPU-rich and GPU-poor researchers further exacerbates this issue.
Whether the new research models offer potential solutions to the challenges in AI research.
And, Sasha’s AI wish for Santa 🎅🏼
As always, paying members can access the whole conversation and transcript available via Substack. Comments are open for members to discuss.
ChatGPT is like raccoons in a trench coat, and we really don’t know what’s under that trench coat. — Sasha Luccioni
Transcript
[00:00:00] Azeem Azhar1: Today, I wanted to chat to Sasha Luccioni. She's an AI researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face, which is the cutest named company in the world with the cutest, corporate logo. It's an open source platform for machine learning models. And she's published some really interesting work on the potential climate impacts of AI, in particular generative AI, that technology that's got everyone really excited during twenty twenty three. We're speaking just as the COP28, so Climate convention is coming to a close.
[00:00:34] So it's great to have Sasha here. How do you feel about COP28?
[00:00:39] Sasha Luccioni: Well, let's say I didn't have the highest expectations of COP28. And I think that I mean, in general, it's there's so many moving parts and so Any actors involved that it's gonna take us a while for the dust to settle and for us to really see the the results, right, of this meeting of so many different nations.
