Despite concerns over the environmental impacts of AI models, it's surprisingly hard to find precise, reliable data on the CO₂ emissions and water use for many major large language models. French model-maker Mistral is seeking to fix that this week, releasing details from what it calls a first-of-its-kind environmental audit "to quantify the environmental impacts of our LLMs."

The results, which are broadly in line with estimates from previous scholarly work, suggest the environmental harm of any single AI query is relatively small compared to many other common Internet tasks. But with billions of AI prompts taxing GPUs every year, even those small individual impacts can lead to significant environmental effects in aggregate.

Is AI really destroying the planet?

To generate a life-cycle analysis of its "Large 2" model after just under 18 months of existence, Mistral partnered with sustainability consultancy Carbone 4 and the French Agency for Ecological Transition. Following the French government's Frugal AI guidelines for measuring overall environmental impact, Mistral says its peer-reviewed study looked at three categories: greenhouse gas (i.e., CO₂) emissions, water consumption, and materials consumption (i.e., "the depletion of non-renewable resources," mostly through wear and tear on AI server GPUs). Mistral's audit found that the vast majority of CO₂ emissions and water consumption (85.5 percent and 91 percent, respectively) occurred during model training and inference, rather than from sources like data center construction and energy used by end-user equipment.

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French AI lab Mistral introduced a range of new features to its Le Chat chatbot on Thursday that bring it closer to the capabilities of rivals like OpenAI and Google. The new update includes a “deep research” mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing. 

French AI startup Mistral is in talks to raise up to $1 billion in equity from investors including Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, reports Bloomberg.

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The fact that it is made by a French startup and compliant with EU rules and regulations such as GDPR and the EU AI Act also helps its appealRead More

Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low.  However, the recent […]