通过选小模型推理,可大幅降低AI能耗。
Small is Sufficient: Reducing the World AI Energy Consumption Through Model Selection
- 根据任务需求选合适大小的模型,不盲目用大模型。
- 不同任务节能效果差异大,最高可省98%能耗。
- 适合关注绿色AI、想降本增效的研究与开发者。
人工智能的能源消耗和碳足迹因成本上升与环境影响日益受到关注。为此,绿色AI新趋势从“越大越好”转向“小而足用”,强调通过更小更高效的模型实现能源节约。本文聚焦推理阶段的模型选择,提出一个简单易行的方法:为特定任务挑选最合适的模型,无需新硬件或架构。我们假设模型规模越大,边际效益越低,因此合理选择模型能显著降低能耗,同时保持良好性能。通过对多种AI任务的系统分析,涵盖其流行度、模型规模与效率,发现任务成熟度和模型采用模式影响节能潜力,范围从1%到98%不等。估算表明,若普遍应用模型选择,2025年全球AI能耗可减少27.8%,节省31.9太瓦时,相当于五个核电厂的年发电量。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The energy consumption and carbon footprint of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become critical concerns due to rising costs and environmental impacts. In response, a new trend in green AI is emerging, shifting from the "bigger is better" paradigm, which prioritizes large models, to "small is sufficient", emphasizing energy sobriety through smaller, more efficient models. We explore how the AI community can adopt energy sobriety today by focusing on model selection during inference. Model selection consists of choosing the most appropriate model for a given task, a simple and readily applicable method, unlike approaches requiring new hardware or architectures. Our hypothesis is that, as in many industrial activities, marginal utility gains decrease with increasing model size. Thus, applying model selection can significantly reduce energy consumption while maintaining good utility for AI inference. We conduct a systematic study of AI tasks, analyzing their popularity, model size, and efficiency. We examine how the maturity of different tasks and model adoption patterns impact the achievable energy savings, ranging from 1% to 98% for different tasks. Our estimates indicate that applying model selection could reduce AI energy consumption by 27.8%, saving 31.9 TWh worldwide in 2025 - equivalent to the annual output of five nuclear power reactors.
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