AI Chat Environmental Impact Analysis
Today, I decided to check Ecosia's new privacy policy to see if it details what model the AI Chat uses. Turns out, it doesn't! However, it does confirm the speculation that Ecosia chose to use Mistral AI models. You can read that here.
Ecosia verifies that prompts are handled on Mistral's servers. Because of this, we can infer environmental impact data about the AI Chat because Mistral AI decided to release an environmental impact report about one of their models last year. Ecosia doesn't say which model they use, so these results are not definite, but it can provide a ballpark for the environmental impact of the AI Chat Ecosia currently provides. I say this because the evaluated model (Large 2) was released at the end of 2024, and Ecosia says they use smaller models, so, assuming Mistral has kept up with the rapid development of AI, a flagship model from two years ago may realistically be as powerful as a modern medium-sized model, and thus have roughly the same environmental impact. Below is what Mistral released about what the Large 2 model consumes for one page of text, and I highly recommend viewing the full report with all of the statistics.
Obviously, Mistral would only release the report if it showed itself favorably, and that begs the question, "Why hasn't there been another for their more recent models?" Also, this analysis relies heavily on assumptions about AI development and Mistral, as well as Ecosia itself (for example, Ecosia's use of the phrase "smaller" could be referring to any class of models as "larger"), so take everything written here with a grain of salt. I am not here to justify or show my support for AI Chat. I posted this analysis to clear up speculation about AI Chat and help others in their research.