AI’s environmental impact per task balloons with more complexity

AI’s toll on the environment will grow considerably as usage shifts toward longer, agentic tasks that require more computational steps. — Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash

As artificial intelligence (AI) use shifts from simple, one-off queries to longer and more complex tasks, the added computing required results in a dramatically larger environmental footprint. The energy needed to build a web app using some models is equivalent to powering a home for 2 1/2 hours.

That’s according to the results of a new analysis from Vals AI, an independent AI benchmarking company that evaluates models on real-world tasks. The firm found that lengthier tasks that require AI models to "think” for longer, like building a software app, can have an environmental impact 10,000 times greater than simple queries, such as asking a basic question that can be answered almost immediately.

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随着人工智能的应用转向耗时更长、需要更多计算步骤的智能任务，其对环境的影响将显著增加。——图片来自 Unsplash，摄影师：Winston Chen

随着人工智能 (AI) 的应用从简单的单次查询转向更复杂、耗时更长的任务，所需的计算量也随之增加，导致环境足迹显著增大。使用某些模型构建一个 Web 应用程序所需的能源相当于为一个家庭供电 2.5 小时。

这是独立人工智能基准测试公司Vals AI最新分析的结果。该公司通过评估模型在实际任务中的表现来得出上述结论。Vals AI发现，需要人工智能模型“思考”更长时间的任务，例如构建软件应用程序，其对环境的影响可能是简单查询（例如提出一个几乎可以立即得到答案的基本问题）的1万倍。

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