Professor Benjamin Lee, at left, speaks in a recent AI infrastructure panel about the energy demands of AI.
As AI advances at breakneck speed, experts at Penn are urgently trying to answer these questions. Professors Arthur van Benthem and Benjamin C. Lee have assembled a multidisciplinary team of scientists, industry professionals, and policy leaders to explore solutions. The group met recently on campus for a two-day workshop, “AI Infrastructure: Foundations for Energy Efficiency and Scalability.”
“There are so many different perspectives on these questions that we wanted to bring everyone together to connect with each other. We want to have a broad impact,” said Lee, a professor in Penn’s Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering and Department of Computer and Information Science.
Lee and van Benthem are recipients of a National Science Foundation Expedition in Computing grant, which is one of the largest awards for sustainability research. The workshop was part of the funding for a project called Carbon Connect, of which Lee is co-director. He and van Benthem said the issues emerging from AI are complex but not impossible.
“Computing in general has a massive environmental impact. Lots of data centers are going up, and they are using a lot of electricity” Lee said. “A second concern is around the manufacturing costs of semiconductors. It’s understanding all of these things and coming up with solutions.”