New AI Legislation is here meaning a big jump in accountability and transparency around energy and emissions reporting.

https://lnkd.in/ejRCN8hV

The new EU AI Act is live meaning new reporting for all AI providers. Key points based on my review:

1) Energy Disclosure: From Aug 1st, all providers of general-purpose AI models are required to disclose energy consumption and compute resources used during training.

2) Harmonised Standards: The Act calls for the development of harmonised standards to ensure consistent AI energy disclosure across the EU. Some Cloud providers will hate this.

3) Sustainable AI Applications: Encouragement for AI applications that help mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. No idea what “encouragement means”!

4) Code of Conduct: Creation of a code of conduct to assess and minimise AI’s environmental impact, including energy-efficient programming and design techniques.

5) Transparency and Documentation: Detailed obligations for AI providers on transparency, record-keeping, and technical documentation to ensure compliance and accountability.

From my perspective, the reporting alone is a big step as no major general-purpose AI provider that I’ve seen currently discloses this information due to the lack of real metrics from data centre providers and underlying tech stack suppliers.

The new regulation seems to be wanting to force providers to take some actual accountability, hopefully meaning greater transparency and accountability.

Will be fascinating to see how the reporting numbers can be aligned with other existing KPIs and metrics (like ISO30134 standards) that most DC providers still ignore.

The reporting alone is going to make the public cloud providers lose a lot of sleep as they really don’t want the world to see their actual usage.