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Professor Benjamin Lee, at left, speaks in a recent AI infrastructure panel about the energy demands of AI.<\/p>\nProfessor Benjamin Lee, at left, speaks in a recent AI infrastructure panel about the energy demands of AI.<\/p>\n
As AI advances at breakneck speed, experts at Penn are urgently trying to answer these questions. Professors Arthur van Benthem<\/a> and Benjamin C. Lee<\/a> 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, \u201cAI Infrastructure: Foundations for Energy Efficiency and Scalability.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere 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,\u201d said Lee, a professor in Penn\u2019s Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering and Department of Computer and Information Science.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Lee and van Benthem are recipients of a National Science Foundation Expedition in Computing<\/a> grant, which is one of the largest awards for sustainability research. The workshop was part of the funding for a project called Carbon Connect<\/a>, of which Lee is co-director. He and van Benthem said the issues emerging from AI are complex but not impossible.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cComputing in general has a massive environmental impact. Lots of data centers are going up, and they are using a lot of electricity\u201d Lee said. \u201cA second concern is around the manufacturing costs of semiconductors. It\u2019s understanding all of these things and coming up with solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n