MIT Technology Review by Melissa Heikkilä -- Each time you use AI to generate an image, write an email, or ask a chatbot a question, it comes at a cost to the planet. In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University. However, they found that using an AI model to generate text is significantly less energy-intensive. Creating text 1,000 times only uses as much energy as 16% of a full smartphone charge. Their work, which is yet to be peer reviewed, shows that while training massive AI models is incredibly energy intensive, it’s only one part of the puzzle. Most of their carbon footprint comes from their actual use.

The study is the first time researchers have calculated the carbon emissions caused by using an AI model for different tasks, says Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher at Hugging Face who led the work. She hopes understanding these emissions could help us make informed decisions about how to use AI in a more planet-friendly way. Luccioni and her team looked at the emissions associated with 10 popular AI tasks on the Hugging Face platform, such as question answering, text generation, image classification, captioning, and image generation. They ran the experiments on 88 different models. For each of the tasks, such as text generation, Luccioni ran 1,000 prompts, and measured the energy used with a tool she developed called Code Carbon. Code Carbon makes these calculations by looking at the en

 by Daniel Howley· Yahoo Technology Editor -- It’s been quite a year for OpenAI. In the last few weeks alone, the company survived an attempted coup in which co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was fired and then rehired following pushback from employees and big-name investors like Microsoft (MSFT). And that’s not even the most interesting part of the story. Exactly one year ago tomorrow, OpenAI’s generative AI-powered ChatGPT hit the web, quickly becoming one of the fastest growing apps in history and setting off an AI gold rush that continues to reverberate across the technology industry and beyond. Companies ranging from Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft, an OpenAI investor, to Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and others are racing to build out their own generative AI-powered software platforms.

On the hardware front, the AI explosion has made Nvidia, the world’s leading AI chip developer, the hottest semiconductor company on Earth, again. Year to date, shares of Nvidia are up more than 200%. Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD), meanwhile, are up 67% and 90%, respectively. “We all understand ChatGPT was a critical inflection point in the history of AI, in spite of the fact that it's only a year out since its initial release,” Rishi Bommasani, the society lead at Stanford’s Center for Research on Foundation Models, told Yahoo Finance. But ChatGPT, and generative AI more generally, have raised questions about data usage rights and the potential to create and spread disinformation via images and videos. “While [generative AI] tools are empowering us in so many ways, with so many kinds of superpowers, it's interesting to consider that the same tools can also apply to what supervillains want to do,” explained Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. “And so we have to think about what guardrails we need to put in place before we deploy the tools so that we ensure that the use is a good one.”

By Thomas Colsy — catholic Herald — Pope Francis has referred to an outspoken American cardinal as his “enemy” and threatened to …

by Kyle Wiggers@kyle_l_wiggers -- TechCrunch Has OpenAI invented an AI technology with the potential to “threaten humanity”? From some of the recent headlines, you might be inclined to think so. Reuters and The Information first reported last week that several OpenAI staff members had, in a letter to the AI startup’s board of directors, flagged the “prowess” and “potential danger” of an internal research project known as “Q*.” This AI project, according to the reporting, could solve certain math problems — albeit only at grade-school level — but had in the researchers’ opinion a chance of building toward an elusive technical breakthrough. There’s now debate as to whether OpenAI’s board ever received such a letter — The Verge cites a source suggesting that it didn’t. But the framing of Q* aside, Q* in actuality might not be as monumental — or threatening — as it sounds. It might not even be new. AI researchers on X (formerly Twitter), including Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, were immediately skeptical that Q* was anything more than an extension of existing work at OpenAI — and other AI research labs besides. In a post on X, Rick Lamers, who writes the Substack newsletter Coding with Intelligence, pointed to an MIT guest lecture OpenAI co-founder John Schulman gave seven years ago during which he described a mathematical function called “Q*.”

Several researchers believe the “Q” in the name “Q*” refers to “Q-learning,” an AI technique that helps a model learn and improve at a particular task by taking — and being rewarded for — specific “correct” actions. Researchers say the asterisk, meanwhile, could be a reference to A*, an algorithm for checking the nodes that make up a graph and exploring the routes between these nodes. Both have been around a while. Google DeepMind applied Q-learning to build an AI algorithm that could play Atari 2600 games at human level… in 2014. A* has its origins in an academic paper published in 1968. And researchers at UC Irvine several years ago explored improving A* with Q-learning — which might be exactly what OpenAI’s now pursuing.

Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, told TechCrunch he believes that Q* is connected to approaches in AI “mostly [for] studying high school math problems” — not destroying humanity. “OpenAI even shared work earlier this year improving the mathematical reasoning of language models with a technique called process reward models,” Lambert said, “but what remains to be seen is how better math abilities do anything other than make [OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot] ChatGPT a better code assistant.”