Environmental impact
Environmental impact is the effect of an activity, product, technology, or system on the natural environment, including effects from resource use, emissions, and waste.
Introduction to Generative AI, Second Edition
Environmental impact is the effect of an activity or system on ecological conditions, including emissions, energy use, water use, and resource extraction.
- How it is used
- Frames LLM environmental impact as an accountability question amid climate concerns and interest in governance standards.
- How deep it goes
- Outlines resource extraction, chip manufacture, training, and inference as assessment boundaries without providing emissions totals or calculation steps.
- Examples
- Uses chip materials and an August 2023 GPU shortage to make hardware demands concrete.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand why an LLM footprint can extend beyond operating electricity to resource extraction and hardware manufacture.
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Build a Text-to-Image Generator (from Scratch)
The effects that an activity or technology has on the natural environment, including through resource and energy use.
- How it is used
- Frames resource and energy use as a limitation on developing and deploying state-of-the-art text-to-image models.
- How deep it goes
- Connects datasets, hardware, training energy, mitigation techniques, and scalability, but stops short of measuring a specific model’s footprint.
- Examples
- Uses state-of-the-art text-to-image training and deployment, large datasets, powerful hardware, and a 2040 energy-use projection as reference points.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate computational trade-offs and recognize pruning, quantization, and transfer learning as footprint-reduction approaches.
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The Art of Code
An environmental effect is the impact that software operation has on the natural environment through resource use and associated emissions or waste.
- How it is used
- Frames software quality as resource-aware craftsmanship that reduces unnecessary computation, storage, data transfer, infrastructure, and cost.
- How deep it goes
- Explains operational and lifecycle causes, then connects them to efficiency, but stops short of detailed measurement procedures or implementation code.
- Examples
- Uses smartphones, servers, digital devices, cloud services, and infrastructure resources to illustrate lifecycle and operational effects.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate software decisions by balancing acceptable responsiveness against infrastructure, electricity use, device lifespan, and environmental cost.
Related concepts
- green coding patternaddressed by · A green coding pattern is a reusable software design or implementation practice that reduces resource consumption and environmental impact.
- impactkind of · Impact is the effect or consequence of an event, action, or condition, often assessed by its magnitude or significance for people, systems, assets, or outcomes.
- carbon footprintmeasures · A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse-gas emissions attributable directly or indirectly to an activity, product, person, or system, usually expressed as carbon-dioxide equivalent.
- databaseused by · A database is an organized collection of persistent data managed by software for storage, retrieval, querying, and modification.
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