Sustainable building of artificial intelligence seems like a pipe dream as tech giants that previously promised to cut emissions race to build massive data centers powered by fossil fuels.
The rush to build artificial intelligence at all costs has been amplified by the Trump administration, which is also rolling back environmental protections.
Despite these difficulties, AI sustainability researcher Sasha Luccioni believes that the demand for greater AI transparency from both enterprises and individuals is greater than ever from customers.
During her four years at Hugging Face, an artificial intelligence company, Luccioni became a leader in efforts to provide greater transparency around emissions and the environmental impact of artificial intelligence, including pioneering results table documenting the energy efficiency of open source AI models. She has also been an outspoken critic of major artificial intelligence companies, which she believes are intentionally hiding information about energy and sustainability from the public.
Now he is founding the Sustainable AI Group, a up-to-date venture together with former Salesforce chief sustainability officer Boris Gamazaychikov. They will focus on helping companies answer the question, among other things: “What levers can we use to make agents a little less angry?” Luccioni is also interested in determining the energy requirements of different types of artificial intelligence tools, such as speech-to-text translation and photo-to-video processing – an area that she believes is so far under-researched.
Luccioni sat down exclusively with WIRED to talk about the demand for sustainable AI and what exactly she expects from Massive Tech.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: I hear a lot from individuals who are concerned about the environment and the operate of artificial intelligence, but I don’t hear as much from companies who are thinking about it. What exactly have you heard from people who operate artificial intelligence in their companies and what are they afraid of?
Sasha Luccioni: First, they feel a lot of pressure from employees – both management and directors, like: “this needs to be quantified.” Their employees say, “You’re forcing us to use Copilot – how does this impact our ESG goals?”
For most companies, artificial intelligence has become a core part of their business offering. In this case, they must be aware of the risks. They need to understand where the models are going. They cannot continue to operate models where they do not even know the location of the data centers or the network to which they are connected. They need to know what the supply chain emissions are, transportation emissions, all these different things.
It’s not about not using artificial intelligence. I think we’re past that now. For example, choosing the right models or sending a signal that the energy source matters so that customers are willing to pay a little more for data centers powered by renewable energy. There are many ways to do this and it is about finding believers in the right places.
I also imagine that for global companies the sustainability situation is very different than in the US, right? The US government may not care, but other governments certainly do.
In Europe they have I HAVE a bill. From the very beginning, sustainability has played a huge role in this. They have included a lot of clauses there and the first reporting initiatives are already underway.
Even Asia is trying to be more lucid. The International Energy Agency produced these reports [on AI and energy use]. I talked to them and they said: other countries are aware that the IEA gets numbers from these countries, and these countries do not have these numbers specifically for data centers. They can’t make forward-looking choices because they need the numbers to know, “OK, that means we need X amount of capacity in the next five years,” or whatever. [Some countries] began to put pressure on data center builders.