The US is facing a serious energy crisis due to insatiable demand for artificial intelligence.

Until now, the unchecked growth of AI agencies has proven nearly impossible to contain. As the technology has taken over the tech sector like wildfire, regulators have been largely powerless to outpace its spread and evolution. Questions about the scope and liability of AI are being thrown around in all directions, but there are few answers to be given. And then there is the issue of the sector’s enormous and growing energy footprint and associated carbon emissions, which are now so significant that the developed world in the face of a serious energy crisis the likes of which have not been seen since the shale revolution.

“AI-based services require much more computing power – and therefore electricity – than standard online activity, which has prompted a series of warnings about the technology’s environmental impact,” the BBC reported recently. recent research Research by scientists at Cornell University has shown that generative AI systems like ChatGPT use up to 33 times more energy than computers running software that performs specific tasks, and each web query handled by AI consumes about ten times more energy than a standard search.

The global AI sector is expected to be responsible for 3.5 percent of global electricity consumption by 2030. In the United States alone, data centers by 2030 it could consume 9 percent of the electricity produceddouble their current level. The development is already causing a stir among Big Tech – earlier this month, Google revealed that its carbon emissions had skyrocketed by 48 percent over the last five years.

The United States not only needs much greater growth in renewables to keep up with the tech sector’s insatiable demand, but it also needs more energy production, period, to avoid crippling shortages. Broad and rapid action on several fronts is needed to slow the runaway AI energy-consumption train, but the United States also needs to keep up with other countries’ AI spending and development amid its own national security concerns. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s not coming back.

“Some strategic areas of the U.S. government’s AI capabilities are currently lagging behind industry, while foreign adversaries are investing in AI at scale,” the latest bulletin from the Department of Energy (DoE) read. “If U.S. government leadership is not quickly established in this sector, the nation risks falling behind in the development of safe and trustworthy AI for national security, energy, and scientific discovery, and thereby compromising our ability to address pressing national and global challenges.”

The question, then, is not how to reverse the global AI takeover, but how to quickly secure new energy sources, how to set strategic limits on the sector’s growth rates and consumption rates, and how to ensure that AI is used responsibly and to the benefit of the energy sector, the country, society and the world.

To that end, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has proposed a new agency-wide initiative to “harness and advance artificial intelligence for the common good,” according to reporting from Axios. Just this month, the DoE released a roadmap for the program, which was first mentioned publicly in May of this year. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security and Technology (FASST) involves the coordinated collaboration of all 17 DoE National Laboratories.

The program would focus on maintaining competitiveness in the AI ​​sector globally, but would also devote significant resources to creating more energy-efficient computer models to avoid compromising the nation’s energy security and climate goals in the process. The program’s five overarching goals are:

• 1. Supporting national security
• 2. Attract and build a talented workforce
• 3. Use AI for scientific discovery
• 4. Solve energy problems
• 5. Developing the technical knowledge necessary to manage artificial intelligence

As part of its goal to “solve energy challenges,” the Department of Energy states that “FASST will unlock new, clean energy sources, optimize energy production and improve grid resilience, and build the advanced energy economy of tomorrow. America needs low-cost energy to support economic growth, and FASST can help us meet that challenge.”

While the proposed FASST program will be a critical first step in the right direction for responsible development and application of AI in the United States, it still needs congressional authorization and funding to be implemented. bipartisan bill has already been presented to the Senate.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

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