🔍 Generative AI: a first step toward greater transparency
The environmental impact of AI is generally poorly documented, and this lack of transparency is a major obstacle to understanding, regulating, and reducing the sector's footprint.
👉 Carbone 4 has nonetheless conducted a life cycle assessment (LCA) of a large language model (LLM) developed by the French startup Mistral AI, with support from ADEME.
A first of its kind: for the first time, a major generative AI player is publicly disclosing the carbon, water, and material impacts of its models, based on real-world data and a rigorous methodology, audited by Resilio I B Corp certified and Hubblo.
👉 This initiative marks a turning point: transparency must become the norm in a sector that remains largely opaque, even as its environmental impacts grow rapidly.
While the impacts may seem low at the individual scale, when multiplied by billions of uses, they can quickly become significant — especially given the explosive growth in AI usage.
⚠️ It’s also essential not to overlook the emissions from model training and GPU manufacturing, which account for a major share of the total footprint — a footprint that adds to the already-high emissions of the digital sector, and runs counter to the decarbonization pathways required by the Paris Agreement.
📊 Key result from our study:
The marginal impact of an inference (~400tokens) with a Mistral model is:
➤ 1 gCO₂e, 5 cL of water, 0.16 mg Sb-eq
💡 After evaluation comes action: steps can be taken to reduce these impacts — notably by locating data centers in low-carbon energy zones within Europe, in order to offer more energy-efficient solutions (see Mistral AI’s infographic for more details).
More broadly, Generative AI companies must question not only their direct emissions, but also the consumption patterns, energy-intensive behaviors, and technological rebound effects they may be accelerating.
➡️ Read our full news here: https://lnkd.in/dtZXJ33v
➡️ Read Mistral AI's study on their blogpost: https://lnkd.in/eYJhF-XT
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI #MistralAI #LLM #ClimateChange
