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Artificial intelligence (AI) has changed the world as we know it. It's been used for everything from health-care monitoring to writing speeches. But the technology's impact on the environment is becoming a serious concern.

ChatGPT, one of the most familiar AI models, is a form of generative AI that uses natural language processing to respond to user queries in a chatbot-style web interface.

When OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, was training the third generation of their model (that is, teaching it what content to generate against users' questions), it used enough electricity to power 120 Canadian homes for an entire year.

And training is just one aspect of an AI model's emissions. The largest contributor over time is model inference, or the process of running the model live. Large language models like ChatGPT run constantly, waiting for a user to ask a question.

The data centers required to power these models currently account for three percent of global energy consumption, they rarely use renewable energy sources, and, according to Forbes, are emitting as much CO 2 as the entire country of Brazil.

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