Frank van Harmelen on RTL.nl

People increasingly use AI. Of course this is not a bad thing in itself: "AI democratizes knowledge. It makes it available. If we use it wisely, it can offer opportunities and can be of great value. Just imagine all the reporting in the health care."

However, one AI search consumes ten times the energy compared to a search in Google. If you want AI to generate a picture, it takes even more energy - generating two pictures equals approximately the energy needed to charge one phone battery. We need to change our way of thinking regarding AI - we need to use the systems more efficiently.

Present systems are in fact based on primitive techniques. Why? What we are doing now, is that AI prevents all libraries, all texts from getting smarter. Literally all of them. Then we are talking about huge computers, hundreds of thousands of calculating machines stored in huge barns in Texas. These machines first consume enormous quantities of energy, and then the air conditioning consumes enormous quantities of energy to cool them down. So you get the bill twice.

Something needs to be done about the massive energy consumption. Van Harmelen suggests we develop one medical model for all medical queries, one specialized model for news, basically a special model for each specialism. "These models will then be much smaller and will be able to communicate with each other."

Click here to read full article (in Dutch).