Abstract
The energy consumption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems has
increased 300,000-fold from 2012 to now, and data centers running
massive AI software produce up to 5-9% of global electricity demand and
2% of all CO2 emissions. Such an increase in energy consumption has
been partially motivated by the strong development of new AI-specific
architectures to improve the performance of AI models. Nevertheless, the
AI community has recently become aware of the importance of considering
energy efficiency as a metric when developing AI techniques. To date, a
great effort has been made to find optimal AI model configurations that
provide the best solution in the shortest possible time. However, only a
few works have sought a compromise between energy cost and system
performance. This paper analyses recent efforts in these directions and
proposes the path toward energy-efficient AI. We describe a set of
energy efficiency strategies for applying and deploying AI models on
different computing infrastructures in search of democratizing an
environmentally sustainable AI. To that end, we propose a full-stack
approach of energy-efficient AI and analyze the role that different
types of users should play, tackling the energy-focused optimization in
all steps of the AI model design flow, from the high levels of models
and algorithm design to the low levels ones, more related to the
hardware and architecture.