Salesforce unveils AI energy efficiency benchmarking platform

Salesforce has teamed up with academic and technology leaders to develop a tool allowing AI developers and users to compare the energy efficiency of different AI models.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used by sustainability teams to streamline data collection and optimise decision-making, but digital experts have expressed concerns about the technology’s growing energy and emissions impact.

Salesforce’s AI Energy Score, developed in collaboration with Hugging Face, Cohere and Carnegie Mellon University, aims to increase transparency on this topic, by allowing users to visualise and compare the energy usage of AI models.

“Transparency like that offered by the AI Energy Score is crucial. Over the past three years, we’ve collaborated to refine and obtain more granular elements for the key indicators like CPU and RAM data. This initiative sets an important milestone, and we hope more proprietary model providers join us in adopting such practices to drive accountability and sustainability across industries and supply chains. By openly sharing energy consumption data, our companies can collectively implement ecodesign practices and minimise the environmental footprint of AI technologies,” said Ariane Thomas, Global Tech Director of Sustainability at L’Oreal Group.

Salesforce will be the first to disclose its AI model’s energy efficiency data on the platform.

Driving market preference for more efficient models

Unveiled at the AI Action Summit taking place this week in Paris, the benchmarking platform includes a standardised framework for measuring and comparing AI model energy efficiency, a public leaderboard featuring scores for 10 common AI tasks (including text generation, image generation, and summarization) performed by 166 models, a platform where AI developers can submit their models to be evaluated and added to the benchmark, and an energy use label rating AI models’ energy efficiency through a star system.

AI Energy Score’s purpose is ultimately to drive AI users to choose more energy-efficient models, reducing the technology’s overall energy consumption and its associated GHG emissions.

“Reducing AI energy consumption lowers operational costs, optimises infrastructure, and enhances long-term sustainability and profitability. We are proud to work with industry leaders to build a more transparent AI ecosystem,” added Suzanne DiBianca, EVP and Chief Impact Officer at Salesforce.

Read also: How smarter deployment can help AI remain a sustainability net positive