NLP Seminar: Environmentally Sustainable AI: Challenges and Solutions
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Abstract
Modern AI approaches, powered by deep learning and large language models (LLMs), have the potential to accelerate progress by augmenting human intelligence in our efforts to overcome urgent societal challenges such as climate change. At the same time, training and deploying these increasingly capable models comes at an increasingly high computational cost, with corresponding energy demands and environmental impacts. In this talk I’ll characterize the complex relationship between AI and the environment, as exemplified by LLMs. I’ll describe what we currently know about the positive and negative environmental impacts of LLMs, and identify some of the key challenges to understanding and shaping those impacts moving forward. I’ll conclude with a roadmap for future LLM research and evaluation that allows for the benefits of AI innovation to outweigh the environmental costs.
Host