New UN report on the environmental cost of LLMs. Key points include: inference (use) causes 90% of energy cost; web search with AI summary costs 10 times a regular search, and video generation is extremely energy intensive. Also, land and water use must be tracked too. unu.edu/inweh/collec...
Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land FootprintsAI’s rapid growth drives huge energy, water, and land use, raising environmental and equity challenges across its global infrastructure.unu.edu