Towards Green AI: Current status and future research
It addresses the environmental sustainability problem for AI researchers and practitioners, but is incremental as it broadens existing discourse without introducing major new solutions.
The paper investigates the current status of environmental assessment and ecodesign in AI systems, termed Green AI, by proposing a life-cycle-based approach and conducting an exemplary carbon footprint estimation of compute hardware.
The immense technological progress in artificial intelligence research and applications is increasingly drawing attention to the environmental sustainability of such systems, a field that has been termed Green AI. With this contribution we aim to broaden the discourse on Green AI by investigating the current status of approaches to both environmental assessment and ecodesign of AI systems. We propose a life-cycle-based system thinking approach that accounts for the four key elements of these software-hardware-systems: model, data, server, and cloud. We conduct an exemplary estimation of the carbon footprint of relevant compute hardware and highlight the need to further investigate methods for Green AI and ways to facilitate wide-spread adoption of its principles. We envision that AI could be leveraged to mitigate its own environmental challenges, which we denote as AI4greenAI.