AI companies should release environmental impact, commit to clean energy, says UN chief

the UN is famously all-bark-no-bite.

This is a good start, but I’d like to see a industry-standard reporting structure & enforce auditing by a non-affiliated third party.

It doesn’t go into detail regarding energy & water sources for their data centres, the construction & impact of those data centres (if applicable), nor how they’re looking to reduce their environmental footprint. In fact, it clearly states their impact grows the larger the model gets (so their impact is only going to get worse), and their primary method of reduction was user education.

They’ve provided no reduction goals for themselves, which could include seeking renewable energy sources, water reduction, software optimisation, etc etc. They’ve also not mentioned their obsolescence planning - what impact equipment life cycling will incur, or how they’re planning to reduce those impacts (e.g. disposal, frequency, etc).

The report downplays the generation costs, comparing it to a radish & video streaming. It omits the average tokens consumed per request, and should be sharing individual statistics for both text, image, video, and audio generation categories. These should be compared against industry standards (both AI & Non-AI).

This is also nearly a year old; are they going to be issuing a new report in July? The frequency of the reports should be mandated annual.

Their current report is nothing more than a puff piece to say they’re “environmentally conscious” and “transparent”, without actually being transparent.