FocoosAI spin-off company ready to push the limits of efficient computer vision
August 28, 2023
Our spin-off company FocoosAI is ready to push the limits of efficient computer vision.
Is AI a true revolution, or just hype of the moment?Well, according to forecasts, AI can have an impact on our lives similar to the industrial revolution.But at what cost? In 2019 researchers estimated that training a (fairly small, with 217M parameters) transformer burns
201 kWh of energy which - in US - results on approx 90 KG of CO2 equivalent emitted.
GPT3.5 (the engine of the famous chatgpt) has 175 billions of parameters, and its training used 1287 MWh of electricity
(approx. 500 tons of CO2e), equivalent to driving 112 gasoline powered cars for a year! [1]How much is that? In 2021 this represented the impact of 33 US citizens’ daily life for a whole year (15 tons each), or
83 Italians (6 tons each) [2] (yes we have a much smaller carbon footprint 😉). Using those models day-by-day may be even
more expensive, as 3/5 of al the energy used by machine learning is during inference [3]. Using GPT3.5 produces 8.5 tons
of CO2/year [3], much more than a person living in Turin, Naples or Rome.To answer our first question, then, I would say: yes, it is… but our planet cannot afford it!
Building larger and larger models, trained on massive amount of data, is simply not the way to go. We are doing research
in Politecnico di Torino to demonstrate that another way is possible. Small, efficient, green and
custom models are more than enough to solve most of the problems out there. And now, with the help of our newborn
Focoos AI we will bring this “gentle” green revolution to the AI market.Stay tuned for a new generation of intelligent, efficient and green machines powered by FocoosAI technology.
Find us here.
