This tool estimates how much electricity your chatbot messages consume

Ever wonder how much electricity you’re using when you prompt, or thank, an AI model? Hugging Face engineer Julien Delavande did, so he built a tool to help arrive at the answer. AI models consume energy each time they’re run. They’re run on GPUs and specialized chips that need a lot of power to carry out the associated computational workloads at scale. It’s not easy to pin down model power consumption, but it’s widely expected that growing usage of AI technologies will drive electricity needs to new heights in the next couple of years. The demand for more power to fuel AI has led some companies to pursue environmentally unfriendly strategies. Tools like Delavande’s aim to bring attention to this, and perhaps give some AI users pause. “Even small energy savings can scale up across millions of queries — model choice or output length can lead to major environmental impact,” Delavande and the tool’s other creators wrote in a statement. Delavande’s tool is designed to work with Chat UI ... Read full article.