Digital technology continues to transform how we live, work, and communicate. It is also regarded by the government as a key driver for economic growth and even providing solutions to ensure sustainability. Our increasing digital lives, however, come with a cost. As our lives revolve around digital technology and data, there is growing concern about the environmental impact of digitalization.
The rapid digitalization of society is driving the increased use of digital devices that serve as the gates for the internet. The 2020 Cisco Internet Report estimates that there will be 29.3 billion networked devices by the end of 2023. With the increased use of Internet-of-Things devices, IDC predicts that there will be 55.7 billion connected IoT devices by 2025 some of which, ironically, are used for climate-change mitigation programs.
A Cornell University study in 2019 estimates that training an AI model with 213 million parameters can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent. The carbon footprint of ChatGPT should be much higher because it consists of 175 billion parameters. This is just the cost of training the model as they also require energy to respond to prompts from users. Considering the popularity of ChatGPT, the number of requests is estimated to be more than a million per day.