MIT, Tech Firms Seek to Improve AI’s Energy Efficiency

Emily Bamforth | EDSCOOP
April 4, 2022

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is leading a group researching energy efficiency in artificial intelligence, anticipating a moment when advanced systems could suck up power at an unsustainable rate.

The MIT AI Hardware Program, announced last week, brings in five industry partners, including Amazon, to examine each step of designing and manufacturing the hardware behind AI-powered technologies. Jesus del Alamo, an electrical engineering professor at MIT and the project’s co-leader, told EdScoop that while AI software is growing quickly — with researchers developing more complicated algorithms pulling from larger data sets — hardware isn’t keeping up.

“This program is about accelerating the development of new hardware to implement AI algorithms so we can do justice to the capabilities that computer scientists are developing,” del Alamo said.