🍾 Happy new year !

To kick off 2025 we want to talk about an important topic for us: matching scientific and technological excellence with environmental responsibility 🌱

GenerativeAI is a powerful tool, bringing us new ways to work and live, in our everyday life. It is as powerful as impressive- if used right -to solve simple and complex topics. However, this has an environmental cost ; just a simple request uses 1 litre of water, and 1 hour of use requires enough energy to power 14 LED lightbulbs.

🪫 The energy consumption of artificial intelligence is skyrocketing with the craze for generative AI, although there is a lack of data provided by companies.

🤖 Interactions with AIs like ChatGPT could consume 10 times more electricity than a standard Google search, according to the International Energy Agency (IAE).

🇸🇪 The increase in electricity consumption by data centres, cryptocurrencies and AI between 2022 and 2026 could be equivalent to the electricity consumption of Sweden or Germany.

🪨 AI’s carbon footprint is far from negligible, with scientists estimating that training the BLOOM AI model emits 10 times more greenhouse gases than a French person in a year.

💧 It seems complex to reduce the energy consumption of AI, making it essential to promote moderation in the future.

Our own takeaways at Lucid Analytics? Keep on pushing technology and scientific applications, foster research, and support our partners in their findings. Better, faster, smarter. But done in a clever way, not over-consuming these tools for our planet ! 🌍

We want to start the year with a positive impact, by committing to improve together with our community!

If you want to know more, the great articles from Polytechnique Insights and Québec Science depict this in detail, as well as Marc Lamarine‘s work for the CSEM on this topic.

PS : this article is of course Gen-AI free 😉