Say less, go small: How to slash AI’s footprint

ChatGPT currently processes about 2.5 billion queries a day, up from 1 billion a day in December.

- Sukanya Datta

Integrating AI into existing tools such as search engines could raise the electricity demands of these programs tenfold, a 2024 report by the International Energy Agency estimates.

‘All this, in a world already battling a climate crisis and intensifying resource scarcities. And for what, researchers are asking.

There are various areas of concern. Resource use is one.

“Who gets to benefit from this technology and who gets left out — that’s another,” says Leona Verdadero, programme specialist with Unesco’s Digital Policies and Digital Transformation division. “Consider this. About 32% of the world’s population, or 2.6 billion people, are still offline altogether.”

Meanwhile, the headlong rush, in the world of Al, is driven by a better-models-at-any-cost approach. A good way to launch into this era would have been to embed resource efficiency from the start, Verdadero says.

Things would have progressed very differently then. The focus would have been on building smaller, task-specific programs, carbon-efficient hardware and a networked interface in which only exceptional, critical queries were submitted to an LLM at large.

The AI models that evolved in such a world would have been less flashy, and their evolution, slower. Resource use would have been far lower too.

Is there a way to change direction now? A host of experiments currently underway indicate there are ways to significantly reduce the environmental impact of AI.

Researchers at University College London (UCL), for instance, conducted a series of experiments on Meta’s open-source Llama large language model (LLM) to show that shrinking its size, shortening prompts and responses, and deploying smaller, application-specific modules could reduce energy consumption by up to 75%.

Their findings were published as part of the 2025 Unesco report, Smarter, Smaller, Stronger: Resource-Efficient Generative Al & the Future of Digital Transformation.