Allen School Distinguished Lecture: Carole Jean Wu ( Facebook AI Research)

The past decade has witnessed ordersofmagnitude increase in the amount of compute for AI. Modern natural language processing models are fueled with over trillion parameters while the memory needs of deep learning recommendation and ranking models have grown from hundreds of gigabytes to the terabyte scale. We will explore the environmental implications of the superlinear growth trend for AI from a holistic perspective, spanning data, algorithms, and system hardware. I will talk about the carbon footprint of AI computing by examining the model development cycle across industryscale use cases and, at the same time, considering the life cycle of system hardware. The talk will capture the operational and manufacturing carbon footprint of AI computing. I will present an endtoend analysis for what and how hardwaresoftware design and atscale optimization can help reduce the overall carbon footprint of AI. Based on the industry experience and lessons learned, I will share the key challenges across the many di