Ask HN: What is your take on carbon emissions of Machine Learning
At the latest since the widely cited article on Green AI [1], there has been increased discussion about the energy consumption of ML. Whenever I talk to colleagues about this, we always agree that there is a dangerous potential lying dormant here, but somehow it cannot be properly grasped. There is simply a lack of really good data. Calculators for emission like from Victor Schmidt and the whole Yoshua Bengio Team at Mila [2] [3] are very good tools for your own use, but can tell you little about the overall situation. So here are two questions for the Hackernews community: 1) How do you assess the topic of ML energy consumption in general and what are factors you consider important? 2) Is it possible to make the energy consumption of ML transparent via legal regulation (such as the currently negotiated AI Act of the EU) and if so, how can something like this look exactly? Or would this be a disaster in the making, because in reality ML is only a small building block of a larger architecture and thus far too laborious to measure for small stakeholder?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1907.10597 [2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1910.09700 [3] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mlco2&#x2F;impact