Paris AI Summit: ‘Start of everything is transparency’, expert says

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00:00To talk more about AI and its implications,

00:02Dr. Sasha Luccioni joins me now on set.

00:05She's a leading scientist in AI ethics and sustainability

00:08with a decade of research and industry expertise.

00:11She's also the climate lead at Hugging Face,

00:14a global startup in open source artificial intelligence.

00:17Sasha, it's such a pleasure to have you with us

00:19on the program today.

00:20Pleasure's mine.

00:21First of all, could you explain a bit your research?

00:23Introduce us to the research that you do

00:25and the work you do.

00:26So my research really focuses on understanding

00:29the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence.

00:31So the energy that it uses,

00:32the carbon emissions that it emits,

00:34the water usage, because currently with the boom

00:37of artificial intelligence around the world,

00:38we're seeing that the planetary impacts are real

00:41and are growing, and we need to know more about them.

00:45Now, a big part of your research

00:46is sustainability practices in AI.

00:49And as a part of your work,

00:50you evaluate the carbon emissions of AI models.

00:53This is not necessarily what we think of first

00:56when we think of artificial intelligence,

00:57we just think something online.

00:59Yeah, it's really interesting because it's not material.

01:02When we talk with a chatbot or with a voice assistant,

01:04we don't really see where it's running,

01:05but it's running on a data center somewhere

01:08using energy that was sometimes generated with coal,

01:11just sometimes with natural gas.

01:12So that really generates carbon emissions.

01:14And these data centers are getting bigger and bigger.

01:16The AI models themselves are getting bigger and bigger,

01:18and they're used in more and more applications, right?

01:21From navigation to chatbots to web search engines.

01:24And so all of this is growing in a way

01:27that's so far away from where we are

01:28that we have trouble actually even understanding

01:31how big it is.

01:32Now, there was an opinion piece

01:34in the French newspaper Le Monde by a group of NGOs.

01:38It was titled,

01:39AI is accelerating ecological disaster,

01:42reinforcing injustice, and worsening power concentration.

01:46They raised the question of whether AI

01:47can truly serve the general interest

01:49when they're driven by governments

01:51and tech giants, essentially.

01:54In your opinion, how do we even begin

01:56to address these issues, these concerns?

01:58I think the start of everything is transparency.

02:01Currently, we're operating with a lack of information,

02:04a lack of understanding of impacts,

02:06a lack of understanding of data, where it's coming from.

02:08So I think that in order to empower users

02:11and NGOs and nonprofits,

02:12we really need to improve the transparency

02:14and legislation is gonna be a key part of that.

02:17And actually, that's why the AI Action Summit

02:19is so impactful because it brings together

02:22groups of people that normally don't cross paths, right?

02:24Tech CEOs, government leaders, researchers,

02:27and nonprofit and citizen groups.

02:30And so bringing everyone in the same room

02:32and getting us to talk is really the first step.

02:35Now, we have to talk about ethics

02:37because it's the one thing that keeps coming up

02:39every time we talk about artificial intelligence,

02:41and rightly so.

02:43There are the privacy concerns,

02:44but there's also the question of inequality

02:47stemming from lack of accessibility to AI.

02:50In your opinion, what are the biggest ethics concerns

02:54in the face of rising AI?

02:56So actually, we recently wrote a paper

02:58with a researcher from INRIA and Meredith Whitaker,

03:01who's the president of the Signal Foundation.

03:03And it's about topics around ethics,

03:05sustainability, and profit.

03:07And actually, they're all really linked

03:08because currently we see bigger and bigger models

03:11trained on more and more data that's our data,

03:13really data that's gathered from the internet.

03:15So there's a surveillance capitalism part of things,

03:17and with bigger and bigger environmental impacts.

03:19And so I think that it's all really linked

03:21because, for example, a huge model is hard to understand,

03:25and it also can discriminate in ways

03:28that we don't understand because we can't study it.

03:30And so there's all these questions of who owns the models,

03:33whose data it is, who's represented in that data.

03:36And also, in terms of cost, the more expensive the model,

03:39the less people can afford to use it, right?

03:41And so smaller models can be owned

03:43by people from the Global South, academia,

03:46whereas bigger models tend to be created

03:48and deployed by big tech companies.

03:50So really, for me, focusing on bias, ethics,

03:53and kind of frugality or efficiency,

03:55they're all really linked.

03:57And as you very well may know already,

04:00there's the data center deal that's been struck

04:03between France and the UAE.

04:06It's obviously a huge project

04:08with billions and billions of euros invested.

04:12In economic terms, it may be an advantage,

04:15but from an environmental point of view,

04:17it's going to just majorly pollute.

04:19So if the data centers are in France,

04:21actually the energy here is at least low carbon.

04:23It's not renewable quite, but it's low carbon.

04:25So there's that.

04:26But I think that currently there's this emphasis

04:29on sovereign compute, on owning data centers in countries.

04:33And I think that often goes

04:35against sustainability principles.

04:37So it's true that I think that if we keep building

04:40these big data centers, it may just make things worse.

04:42But if we think about alternative ways of, for example,

04:45distributing compute or making it more efficient,

04:48more kind of democratized as well, then we can,

04:52but of course that doesn't come with the same pizzazz

04:54as announcing a multi-billion dollar deal,

04:57but saying, oh, hey, we took some empty warehouses

05:00in urban areas that were disused

05:02and we're building some smaller data centers

05:03and recycling the heat so that it heats people's homes

05:06is a lot more frugal and sustainable as a solution.

05:10But of course, it's not a sexy baby.

05:12It's not as sexy, but it's important though.

05:14Right, exactly.

05:16Now, I think we need to talk about how AI

05:18can be a force of good,

05:19because we don't want it to sound too dystopian

05:21and we can't dismiss the advantages that AI could bring.

05:25It can be deployed to perhaps tackle climate change,

05:28disaster relief, even wildlife conservation.

05:31Can you give us more examples of what these might look like?

05:34Definitely, I'm actually part of a volunteer organization

05:37called Climate Change AI.

05:38And for five years now, we've been bringing together people,

05:41funding grants, funding projects, organizing workshops.

05:44And essentially, there are so many ways

05:45in which AI can be a force for climate action,

05:48everything from designing new batteries.

05:50So for example, coming up with new combinations of molecules

05:52that are better than the lithium ion batteries

05:54that we currently use, biodiversity monitoring.

05:57So for example, in Canada, I work with a team

06:00of entomologists to monitor moths

06:02in areas where there's no data.

06:04And so we have these AI enabled cameras

06:06that detect actually new species

06:08that we never even knew existed and we can track them.

06:11And then of course, everything with remote sensing.

06:15You can even monitor the health of coral reefs from space

06:18using AI and LIDAR imagery and satellite imagery together.

06:22You can actually, without having to like dive and go check,

06:24you can actually see how coral reefs are doing.

06:25So there's all this good out there and it's not all bad,

06:29but I think it's important to understand

06:30that AI is not a single technology.

06:32There's so many different approaches

06:33and what we hear about Chad GPT

06:35and all these deep-seek models,

06:37they're not necessarily the ones that are climate positive.

06:40And those climate positive models are usually smaller,

06:42very task-specific,

06:43but we don't really hear about them as much.

06:46Lastly, if you will, what responsibilities are

06:49or should be at the forefront of governments and businesses

06:53who increasingly need to create AI systems

06:56which are ethical, transparent, and sustainable?

06:59I mean, what do they need to be doing differently

07:01that they're not doing now?

07:02I think we should be asking for more accountability

07:04from tech companies because especially

07:06if governments are adopting these tools

07:08as part of their internal or external processes,

07:12we need to make sure that, for example,

07:14we know how much energy they're using,

07:15we know what data they were trained on,

07:16we know how the data that we put into these models

07:19is being used, right?

07:20Is it a privacy violation?

07:22I think currently we're often governments and people,

07:25citizens alike, are taking it as granted.

07:27Oh, we're gonna use this tool

07:27because it's supposedly the best one, right?

07:29Because some tech company said

07:31that it has the best accuracy,

07:32but we should be really questioning this discourse more

07:36and asking enough questions

07:38so we can make informed decisions

07:39without just believing that it's the best and greatest.

07:43Indeed, very important indeed.

07:45Dr. Sasha Luciani, thank you so much

07:47for being with us on the program today.

07:48It's a pleasure to have you with us.

07:49Thank you for having me.

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