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Carbon Emissions and Large Neural Network Training

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abstract

The computation demand for machine learning (ML) has grown rapidly recently, which comes with a number of costs. Estimating the energy cost helps measure its environmental impact and finding greener strategies, yet it is challenging without detailed information. We calculate the energy use and carbon footprint of several recent large models-T5, Meena, GShard, Switch Transformer, and GPT-3-and refine earlier estimates for the neural architecture search that found Evolved Transformer. We highlight the following opportunities to improve energy efficiency and CO2 equivalent emissions (CO2e): Large but sparsely activated DNNs can consume <1/10th the energy of large, dense DNNs without sacrificing accuracy despite using as many or even more parameters. Geographic location matters for ML workload scheduling since the fraction of carbon-free energy and resulting CO2e vary ~5X-10X, even within the same country and the same organization. We are now optimizing where and when large models are trained. Specific datacenter infrastructure matters, as Cloud datacenters can be ~1.4-2X more energy efficient than typical datacenters, and the ML-oriented accelerators inside them can be ~2-5X more effective than off-the-shelf systems. Remarkably, the choice of DNN, datacenter, and processor can reduce the carbon footprint up to ~100-1000X. These large factors also make retroactive estimates of energy cost difficult. To avoid miscalculations, we believe ML papers requiring large computational resources should make energy consumption and CO2e explicit when practical. We are working to be more transparent about energy use and CO2e in our future research. To help reduce the carbon footprint of ML, we believe energy usage and CO2e should be a key metric in evaluating models, and we are collaborating with MLPerf developers to include energy usage during training and inference in this industry standard benchmark.

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  • abstract The computation demand for machine learning (ML) has grown rapidly recently, which comes with a number of costs. Estimating the energy cost helps measure its environmental impact and finding greener strategies, yet it is challenging without detailed information. We calculate the energy use and carbon footprint of several recent large models-T5, Meena, GShard, Switch Transformer, and GPT-3-and refine earlier estimates for the neural architecture search that found Evolved Transformer. We highlight the following opportunities to improve energy efficiency and CO2 equivalent emissions (CO2e): Large

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Token Arena: A Continuous Benchmark Unifying Energy and Cognition in AI Inference

cs.AI · 2026-05-01 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

TokenArena is a continuous benchmark for AI inference endpoints that measures output speed, time to first token, blended price, effective context, quality, and modeled energy to produce composites of joules per correct answer, dollars per correct answer, and endpoint fidelity.

Stochastic Thermodynamics of Associative Memory

cond-mat.stat-mech · 2026-01-03 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

DenseAMs show tradeoffs between entropy production, retrieval accuracy, and speed at intermediate loads, with a new failure mode in higher-order networks at finite temperature.

SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts

cs.CV · 2025-11-20 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

SAM 3 introduces promptable concept segmentation that doubles accuracy of prior systems on images and videos while improving standard SAM segmentation performance.

Segment Anything

cs.CV · 2023-04-05 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

A promptable model trained on 1B masks achieves competitive zero-shot segmentation performance across tasks and is released publicly with its dataset.

Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer

cs.CL · 2022-10-13 · conditional · novelty 7.0

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OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models

cs.CL · 2022-05-02 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

OPT releases open decoder-only transformers up to 175B parameters that match GPT-3 performance at one-seventh the carbon cost, along with code and training logs.

High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models

cs.CV · 2021-12-20 · conditional · novelty 7.0

Latent diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art inpainting and competitive results on unconditional generation, scene synthesis, and super-resolution by performing the diffusion process in the latent space of pretrained autoencoders with cross-attention conditioning, while cutting computational and

Recasting AI Data Centers as Engines for Carbon Removal

math.OC · 2026-05-13 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

AI data center waste heat upgraded by heat pumps can drive direct air capture to achieve net CO2 removal and offset operational emissions in several US states under current and 2030 scenarios.

Language-Conditioned Visual Grounding with CLIP Multilingual

cs.CL · 2026-05-09 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Fixing the visual encoder in multilingual CLIP isolates text-branch deficits as the cause of lower visual grounding performance for low-resource languages, with model scaling widening some gaps but not others.

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