AI is Great… as Long as You’re Careful About How You Use It

AI is, undoubtedly, an incredibly powerful tool… there’s a reason so many of us now turn to it for so many purposes. Unfortunately, its power necessitates an equally incredible amount of energy. Let’s spend a few moments putting this need into perspective and examining what it means for us.

Every Prompt Has a Cost

Regardless of whether you’re prompting an AI to summarize a meeting and identify action steps, or to find out what your cat would look like as a Muppet, you’re using a very powerful computer to very quickly complete some very complicated calculations. Just a few of these prompts add up fast.

How fast?

Ten times as fast.

A few complicated prompts can eat through as much energy as an LED lightbulb uses over a few hours… and the costs don’t stop there. The data centers that power these calculations need to keep their hardware from overheating… something that such calculations can easily cause, if one remembers the cryptomining boom of a few years ago and how many GPUs were burned out as a result.

To protect their servers from this fate, these centers use massive volumes of water to cool their hardware. By 2023, overall water consumption had jumped by 34 percent due to AI’s demands, with those needs only growing as prompts and AI models become more sophisticated. This has already created issues for those in the agriculture industry around these data centers, as well as for the surrounding communities’ power grids.

Changing the Carbon Footprint into a Carbon Handprint

By now, most of us have at least heard the term “carbon footprint,” or the negative impact on the environment that your business contributes to. The opposite also exists in the form of the “carbon handprint,” which is a measure of the positive impact your business’ tech has on the environment and the effort to solve the various problems that have already been created.

Responsibly using AI means taking advantage of its capabilities to optimize your supply chains and any travel you need to complete for work, or using it to improve your office’s energy efficiency.

It is Important to Manage Your AI to Minimize Waste

There are a few steps that you can take internally as a means of cutting down on the waste that your business’ usage of AI produces.

First, make sure the licenses you’re maintaining are appropriate for your needs. You don’t need dozens if only a few people are actually using it throughout the day, and even unused licenses contribute to the environmental impact of the host server farm.

Second, consider how well an AI tool matches your processes. AI comes in many shapes and sizes, each with appropriate use cases. Using one of the more powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) for simpler tasks, like proofreading for grammar corrections, is akin to using a steamroller to mash a potato… wasteful, expensive, and overkill.

Trust Us to Help You Use Your Tools and Tech as Productively as Possible

By working with us, businesses around Southeast United States can access the technologies they need for success without shouldering the responsibility of managing them. We’ll work with you to ensure that you get the best deals, support you as you use your IT, and help you plan for the future.

Are you ready to lock in on your success? Reach out to us at (276) 601-3208 to get started.