I'm rarely on the side of a Goldman Sachs... Still this paper seems to be spot on. The equation between the costs (financial and ecological) and the value we get out of generative AI isn't balanced at all. Also, since it is stuck on trying to improve mostly on model scale and amount of data it is doomed to plateau in its current form.

This arm race should be stopped... This is becoming an ecological disaster, so much wasted energy.

More work about eco-design of software. This is definitely welcome. I found this work a bit weak on the state of the art and the interview parts (10 people in the same company). But the field is so nascent that it's to be expected I guess, PhD students have to do with what they have access to. Unsurprisingly this shows a great lack of proper tools to tackle the measurement problem. This thesis shows interesting prospects to reduce variations in measurements though, some of the proposed guidelines might help but cannot offset the hardware heterogeneity completely... The parts focusing on practical advices around Java use and deployment are interestingly easy to apply though. You need to take into account the context of your application to make the right choices of course.

This is one of the main problems with using those generative models as currently provided. It's time for the legislators to step up, we can't let a couple of players hoard energy and water for themselves.

Interesting paper evaluating a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method to estimate the power consumption and environmental impact of generative AI services. This is illustrated on a single service, hopefully we'll see more such assessments.

Very interesting paper about the energy footprint of the latest trend in generator models. The conclusion is fairly clear: we should think twice before using them.

What are the hardware improvements good for if then it's all locked down through software? This is wasted.

Sure they're pulling some effort on the way their hardware is produced and cheap. But don't be fooled by the grand claims, this can't be carbon neutral.

Lays out the ethical problems with the current trend of AI system very well. They're definitely not neutral tools and currently suffer from major issues.

This is an excellent piece. Very nice portrait of Emily M. Bender a really gifted computational linguist and really bad ass if you ask me. She's out there asking all the difficult questions about the current moment regarding large language models and so far the answers are (I find) disappointing. We collectively seem to be way too fascinated by the shiny new toy and the business opportunities to pay really attention to the impact on the social fabric of all of this.

Coming from Zombie Nokia, still I think we need more options like this. It is the number one solution to reduce ecological footprints of computing.

Cool! It's nice to see this handbook published. Should help quite a bit to have more desktop applications certified.

Interesting plugin for SonarQube to evaluate the footprint of a mobile application. This should complete well what exists for desktop applications and web frontends.

Very interesting technique. Clearly some more work but prevents deforesting like mad for lumber. It's amazing to see those... clearly a bit like giant bonsais.

I often find tools regarding environmental impacts on the client side. This group seems to focus more on the server side, definitely something to look into.

Good thinking about the recent Mastodon users increase. Highlights fairly well why it's desirable, why it's a better social media platform but also the challenges ahead... including resources consumption.

Interesting research about city planning. Definitely a bigger challenge in the future for larger cities.

Planting trees to help, sure. Let's do it properly though, sometimes that means just getting out of the way.

Too little too late? Let's hope not... now it's time to see radical changes.

An excellent piece about the links between collapse and complexity. Obviously focuses more on socio-economics systems. Still some of it applies to other fields.