What It Will Take to Make AI Sustainable
Researcher Sasha Luccioni argues we need better emissions data and a better sense of how people are using AI in the first place.
Building AI sustainably seems like a pipe dream as tech giants that previously made promises to cut emissions have been racing to build out massive data centers powered by fossil fuels .
The rush to build out AI at all costs has been reinforced by the Trump administration, which is also rolling back environmental protections .
Despite these headwinds, Sasha Luccioni, an AI sustainability researcher, thinks that demand for more transparency in AI, from both businesses and individuals, is higher than ever from the customer side.
Luccioni has become a leader in trying to create more transparency about AI’s emissions and environmental impacts in her four years at Hugging Face, an AI company, including pioneering a leaderboard documenting the energy efficiency of open-source AI models. She has also been an outspoken critic of major AI companies that, she says, are deliberately withholding energy and sustainability information from the public.
Now, she’s starting Sustainable AI Group, a new venture with former Salesforce sustainability chief Boris Gamazaychikov. They’ll focus on helping companies answer, among other things, “what are the levers that we can play with in order to make agents slightly less bad?” Luccioni is also interested in sussing out the energy needs of different types of AI tools, such as speech-to-text translation, or photo-to-video—an area that’s she says has so far been understudied.
Luccioni sat down exclusively with WIRED to talk about the demand for sustainable AI and what exactly she wants to see from Big Tech.
