Experts are skeptical about Google’s AI water consumption claims

Yesterday, we covered Google’s report that a typical query to its Gemini AI consumes only “five drops of water.” That figure is now facing criticism from several AI experts, according to The Verge… and that includes one of the authors of one of the reports referred to by Google.

AI researcher Shaolei Ren—a professor at University of California Riverside and one of the authors of the report Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models—previously estimated that Microsoft’s data center consumed 700,000 liters of water to train OpenAI’s GPT-3 model. He also calculated that a ChatGPT conversation of 20 to 50 messages can consume close to a pint of water, which is far more than Google’s estimate.

Ren and other AI researchers argue that Google is wrong to leave out the indirect water consumption of its AI models. Google’s figures only mention the water used to cool its data centers while ignoring the water consumption of the power plants that supply the data centers with electricity. “Google’s five drops per query is just the tip of the iceberg,” says sustainability researcher Alex de Vries-Gao.

Experts are also critical of Google’s figures on the carbon emissions of AI models. Google is said to have used market-based emissions figures, and can therefore exclude electricity certificates and carbon credits. The figure therefore doesn’t show how much CO2 the AI models actually emit.