Opera, which is also working to get a piece of the growing AI market, has announced that it wants to do it in a more sustainable way, betting on renewable energies to supply the high amounts of energy that these types of systems require. With this, the company shows an ecological side in its future plans to grow in Artificial Intelligence.
This is a measure that deserves to be replicated by the rest of companies, since the environmental problem that exists in the world is well known, and Artificial Intelligence is already consuming huge amounts of energy and other resources such as water.
A more eco-friendly AI
As Opera has stated in a meeting with investors, they are aiming for Aria, their upcoming Artificial Intelligence, to have a green commitment to the environment, being designed with high energy efficiency, and powered by renewable energies such as geothermal and hydroelectric, thus allowing Aria to become the most eco-friendly generative AI on the planet today. Additionally, with servers in Iceland, Opera seeks to take advantage of the natural cooling provided by the environment.
Therefore, it is a measure or, at the very least, a measure by Opera that deserves support, since the rest of the companies have not taken the same role to tackle this growing problem in the sector. One of the few exceptions would be Microsoft, which, rather than opting for renewable energy, is researching to develop an Artificial Intelligence that requires less resources and energy to have a lower environmental impact.
AI is in fashion
Artificial Intelligence is a trendy concept nowadays. Although it has been part of our daily lives for decades, it has only been in recent years that it has experienced a meteoric development in this field. In fact, this trend has become much stronger since late 2022 to the present day, with the popularization of AI models such as Dall-E or ChatGPT. However, with its increasingly extensive use, its energy consumption has also skyrocketed.
In this way, an important problem has been revealed in terms of environmental impact, and that is that, while AI developments have focused on improving it, making it smarter, and enhancing its functions, much less effort has been dedicated to making these systems energy efficient, consuming large amounts of energy, generating a lot of heat, and requiring a lot of cooling. Therefore, proposals like Opera’s are addressing this problem from a very important ecological standpoint.
