Artificial intelligence is energy-hungry and as companies race to make it bigger, smarter and more complex, its thirst for electricity will increase even further. This sets up a thorny problem for an industry pitching itself as a powerful tool to save the planet: a huge carbon footprint. Yet according to Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, there is a clear solution to this tricky dilemma: nuclear fusion.
An online search using AI could require at least 10 times more energy than a standard search, de Vries calculated in a recent report on AI’s energy footprint. The dynamic is one of “bigger is better when it comes to AI,” de Vries said, pushing companies toward huge, energy-hungry models. “That is the key problem with AI, because bigger is better is just fundamentally incompatible with sustainability,” he added.