Emily Kwong
Appearances
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
In 2018, Sasha Luciani started a new job, AI researcher for Morgan Stanley. She was excited to learn something new in the field of AI, but she couldn't shake this worry.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Benjamin Lee studies computer architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Generative AI refers to the AI that uses large language models.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
And data center construction is only going to increase. On January 21st, the day after his second inauguration, President Trump announced a private joint venture to build 20 large data centers across the country, as heard here on NBC.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
This new project, known as Stargate, would together consume 15 gigawatts of power. That would be like 15 new Philadelphia-sized cities consuming energy. Consider this. As much as big tech says they want to get to net zero, there are no regulations forcing them to do so. So how is the industry thinking about its future and its environmental footprint? From NPR, I'm Emily Kwong.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Let's consider this from NPR. OK, so the four cloud giants, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, all have climate goals, goals for hitting net zero carbon emissions, most by 2030, Amazon by 2040. And there's a few ways they can get there. Let's start with a very popular energy source for big tech, nuclear.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Because Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet, which runs Google, just signed an agreement, along with other companies, that supports tripling the global nuclear supply by 2050. And along with Microsoft, these four companies have signed agreements to purchase nuclear energy, an industry that has been stagnant for years.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Microsoft has committed to buying power from an old nuclear plant on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. You may remember that was the site of a partial nuclear meltdown in 1979. And NPR's Nina Totenberg talked to kids in the Harrisburg area right after. You know what evacuation is?
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
While some radioactive gas was released, thankfully, it wasn't enough to cause serious health effects. And Microsoft now wants to build this nuclear site back. In a way, AI companies are turning into energy brokers. But my science desk colleague, Jeff Brumfield, sees a discrepancy in this between the AI people and the nuclear energy people.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Because of accidents like Three Mile Island, Jeff says that nothing in the nuclear industry ever happens quickly. It's also extremely expensive. And while solar and wind energy combined with batteries is quicker to build and more inexpensive than nuclear or gas power plants, it still takes time to build. And there are problems hooking up new energy sources to the grid.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
So Luciani quit her job and joined a growing movement to make AI more sustainable. Since 2022, AI has boomed and it's caused a surge in energy consumption. Tech companies are racing to build data centers to keep up these huge buildings filled with hundreds of thousands of computers that require a lot of energy.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
So in the meantime, many data centers will continue to use fossil fuels. But there's another solution here, and that's to make data centers themselves more efficient, through better hardware, better chips, and more efficient cooling systems. One of the most innovative methods on the rise is liquid cooling.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Basically, running a synthetic fluid through the hottest parts of the server to take the heat away, or immersing whole servers in a cool bath. It's the same idea as running coolant through your car engine, and a much faster way to cool off a hot computer. Here's Benjamin Lee again at UPenn.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
One of the biggest providers of liquid cooling is Isotope. David Craig is their recently retired CEO and based in the UK.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Craig says that the older way of cooling data centers, basically there's lots of methods, but it's a daisy chain of moving heat with air and water, is consumptive. With liquid cooling, a lot of the heat stays in the system and computers don't have these massive swings in temperature.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Liquid cooling, however... is expensive, which makes it hard to scale. But iZotope has announced public partnerships with Hewlett-Packard and Intel, and a spokesperson at Meta told me they anticipate some of the company's liquid cooling-enabled data centers will be up and running by 2026.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Throughout my many emails and seven hours of phone conversations with spokespersons at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, too, there was one innovation they were kind of quiet about. And it's the one that scientists and engineers outside of big tech were most excited about. and that is smaller AI models.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
One's good enough to complete a lot of the tasks we care about, but in a much less energy-intensive way. Basically, a third and final solution to AI's climate problem is using less AI. One major disruptor in this space is DeepSeek, the chatbot out of a company in China claiming to use less energy. We reached out to them for comment, but they did not reply. You see,
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Large language models like ChatGPT are often trained using large datasets, say by feeding the model over a million hours of YouTube content. But DeepSeq was trained by data from other language models. Benjamin Lee at UPenn says this is called a mixture of experts.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
By 2028, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory forecasts the data centers could consume as much as 12 percent of the nation's electricity. And AI is also leading a surge in water consumption. It's a concern echoed all over social media.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Even though DeepSeq was trained more efficiently this way. Other scientists I spoke to pointed out it's still a big model. And Sasha Luciani at Hugging Face wants to walk away from those entirely.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
What Sasha is talking about are small language models, which have far fewer parameters and are trained for a specific task. And some tech companies are experimenting with this. Last year, Meta announced a smaller quantized version of some of their models. Microsoft announced a family of small models called PHY3.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
A spokesperson for Amazon said they're open to considering a number of models that can meet their customers' needs. And a spokesperson for Google said they did not have a comment about small language models at this time. So meanwhile, the race to build infrastructure for large language models is very much underway. Here's Kevin Miller, who runs global infrastructure at Amazon Web Services.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
If that is the level of computing we're headed for, Luciani has one last idea. An industry-wide score for AI models. Just like Energy Star became a widely recognized program for ranking the energy efficiency of appliances. She says that tech companies, however, are far from embracing something similar.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
So as a science reporter for NPR, my main question is, do we really need all of this computing power when we know it could imperil climate goals? And David Craig, the recently retired CEO of Isotope, chuckled when I asked this. He said, Emily, you know, human nature is against us.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
But here's something I think we can all think about. The AI revolution is still fairly new. Google CEO Sundar Pichai compared AI to the discovery of electricity. Except unlike the people during the industrial revolution, we know AI has a big climate cost. And there's still time to adjust how and how much of it we use.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
This episode was produced by Avery Keatley and Megan Lim, with audio engineering by Ted Meebane. It was edited by Adam Rainey, Sarah Robbins, and Rebecca Ramirez. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Emily Kwong. You can hear more science reporting like this on the science podcast I co-host every week, Shorewave. Check it out.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Where will that water come from? And the four big data center operators with a growing water and carbon footprint are Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. And to be clear, all four of those are among NPR's financial supporters and pay to distribute some of our content.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Every month, NPR reporter Brian Mann checks a grim statistic, the federal tally of overdose deaths across the country. For years, that number only went up.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Consider this. The recent decline in overdose deaths is an unprecedented public health victory, one that shocked even experts in the field. Today, for our Weekly Reporter's Notebook series, we're going to unravel the mystery of this rapid reversal with Brian Mann, NPR's addiction correspondent. From NPR, I'm Emily Kwong.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
It's Consider This from NPR. In 2023, when federal data started to show a decline in overdose deaths, some public health experts were skeptical.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Maybe it was a fluke. But the next month, same thing.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
This is Nabaran Dasgupta, a leading addiction researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
The skepticism is now gone. So the question is, how did this happen? All Things Considered co-host Scott Detrow picks up the conversation from here, talking with NPR's addiction correspondent Brian Mann about the reasons behind this surprising public health victory.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Brian also started hearing the same thing from sources on the street. Like this man, Kevin Donaldson, who was using fentanyl and xylosine in Burlington, Vermont.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Across the country, the number of overdose deaths has continued to drop to this day.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
That was NPR's addiction correspondent, Brian Mann, speaking with All Things Considered co-host, Scott Detrow. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell and edited by Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Emily Kwong.