- A study conducted by American researchers emphasizes the water footprint of AIs such as ChatGPT
- The impact is quite significant and could grow further in the future
- Tech giants claim to take this issue into account
We are only at the very beginning of the democratization of AI language models such as ChatGPT. Little by little, signals are reaching us about their environmental impact. This time it is the turn of American researchers from the universities of California, Riverside, and Texas to sound the alarm in a study.
They point out that training GPT-3 in Microsoft’s data centers required 700,000 liters of fresh water. This figure does not tell us much, but to put it in context, we can say that it is equivalent to the amount of water needed to cool a nuclear reactor.
Scientists estimate from this information that it takes 500 ml of water for between 20 and 50 responses to requests from Internet users. This seems quite low, but one can imagine that this total is much higher to meet the demands of hundreds of millions of AI users.
A new thorn in the side of ChatGPT
This is a real concern because we know that water is an increasingly limited resource in the world and that water stress is increasing, including in certain French regions which were previously spared.
Questioned, Microsoft wanted to react to our colleagues d’Insider. The Tech giant explains that it “invests in research to measure the energy consumption and carbon impact of AI while working on ways to make large systems more efficient, both in terms of training and application”.
The spokesperson for the Redmond firm adds: “We also continue to invest in purchasing renewable energy and other efforts to achieve our sustainability goals of being carbon neutral, water positive and zero waste by 2030”.
In any case, this is a new challenge for these large technology companies. In a previous article, we raised the impact of ChatGPT and its rivals on climate change.
These technologies indeed require significant computing power for their training and operation. While Internet use already accounts for almost 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and even if digital technology is not the most polluting industry, we will therefore have to take these issues into account. account to find new solutions.
