AI giants accused of hiding environmental footprint

The boom in artificial intelligence (AI) comes with environmental costs that are still largely hidden. Ahead of the AI for Good summit in Geneva, Sasha Luccioni, a researcher specialising in the ecological footprint of AI, gives Swissinfo her critical view. "Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it," wrote physicist Stephen Hawking in 2018, shortly before his death. Just a few years later, artificial intelligence has become part of our daily lives: shopping recommendations, intelligent navigation, automatic translations, chatbots... Behind these seemingly dematerialised uses, supported by "clouds" or "virtual clouds", lie very real infrastructures that consume energy, water and metals, and whose environmental cost is often overlooked. Sasha Luccioni sets out to unravel this paradox of dematerialisation. A computer scientist and climate manager at Hugging Face, an open-access artificial intelligence platform, she warns of ...