Building Green Software

Chapter 8. Greener Machine Learning, AI, and LLMs

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.

Alan Turing

In late March of 2023, Bill Gates wrote in his blog GatesNotes, “The Age of AI Has Begun,” and said that artificial intelligence will be as revolutionary as mobile phones or the internet. That is quite the statement, especially for the two authors who are barely old enough to remember a time without mobile phones or the internet. There is no denying that we live in the age of AI and machine learning (ML). Never before has it had as profound an impact on our lives as it has right now. AI makes splashy headlines in all areas of life, from art to medicine to warfare to school papers to climate.

AI is not new. Alan Turing first suggested the idea of a “thinking machine” in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in 1950.¹ In this article he defines the now world-famous idea of “The Imitation Game,” which we now call the Turing test. The test is designed to judge whether or not a computer has human, or humanlike, cognitive abilities. This idea was, and still is over 70 years later, captivating and thought-provoking—not only to industry folks like you and us, but also to Hollywood, as evidenced by several adaptations of the idea, such as Westworld, Ex Machina, and The Imitation Game.

Since the first AI models, in the 1950s and 1960s, AI continued to develop at the same pace as Moore’s law up until 2012. ...