Welcome to our This Week in AI roundup - this week we have stories about measuring the true carbon footprint of artificial intelligence, GPT-4 rumours, and AI-based drone assassins.
- Exploring the Environmental Impact of Artificial Intelligence
- GPT-4 Rumors in Silicon Valley
- Microdrones: AI-powered drones that could become weapons of mass destruction.
💎 Top Stories
Exploring the Environmental Impact of Artificial Intelligence
- AI startup Hugging Face has undertaken the tech sector’s first attempt to estimate the broader carbon footprint of a large language model.
- Hugging Face believes it has come up with a new, better way to calculate emissions produced during the model’s whole life cycle rather than just during training.
- To test its new approach, Hugging Face estimated the overall emissions for its own large language model, BLOOM.
- The researchers found that figure doubled when they took into account the emissions produced by manufacturing computer equipment used for training and running BLOOM once it was trained.
- While 50 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions is significant, it's significantly less than other LLMs of the same size because BLOOM was trained on nuclear-powered hardware.
- Emma Strubell says that this paper sets a new standard for organizations developing AI models and provides clarity on just how enormous LLMs' carbon footprints really are.
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We’re getting a better idea of AI’s true carbon footprint
AI startup Hugging Face has undertaken the tech sector’s first attempt to estimate the broader carbon footprint of a large language model.
Melissa Heikkilä
GPT-4 Rumors in Silicon Valley
- GPT-4 is the most anticipated AI model in history and is expected to be released sometime between December and February.
- OpenAI has been tight-lipped about GPT-4, but recent leaks suggest that the model will be significantly larger, better at multitasking, less dependent on good prompting, and have a larger context window than its predecessor.
- If these claims are true, GPT-4 would represent a >100x improvement over GPT-3.
Read the full story:
GPT-4 Rumors From Silicon Valley
People are saying things...
Alberto Romero
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Microdrones: AI-powered drones that could become weapons of mass destruction
- Drones are becoming increasingly prevalent and advanced, with some models being able to autonomously select and kill targets.
- This technology is not yet widespread, but it is rapidly improving and could have major implications for the future of warfare.
- Some experts are concerned about the potential misuse of this technology, particularly if it falls into the hands of groups with ill intentions.
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Drone assassins: the AI weapons of mass destruction rewriting the rules of war
We are entering the much prophesied age of the killer robot – but do we really know what we’re unleashing?
Henry Bodkin
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