French AI summit to focus on environmental impact of energy-hungry tech

Event will push for greater transparency and aims to rank AI firms in terms of ability to meet climate goals

World leaders at the next AI summit will focus on the impact on the environment and jobs, including the possibility of ranking the greenest AI companies, it has been announced.

Rating artificial intelligence companies in terms of their ecological impact is among the proposals under consideration, while other areas being looked at include the effect on the labour market, giving all countries access to the technology, and bringing more states under the wing of global AI governance initiatives.

France will host the next global summit on 10 and 11 February, with international politicians expected to attend alongside tech executives and experts. Anne Bouverot, Paris’s special envoy for AI, said discussions would include measuring the technology’s impact on the environment.

“We’ll definitely push for more transparency by all players, and maybe a way to do that is to have a ranking or leaderboard,” she said, adding that such a system would highlight companies that are not transparent about their environmental impact. “You can very clearly say: ‘Well this company we cannot rank because we don’t have the data.’”

AI’s effect on the environment has been underlined by leading tech companies, which say that developing the technology is hampering their ability to meet climate goals. Google and Microsoft have both said that their AI strategies – which rely on energy-hungry datacentres to develop and operate AI models – are endangering corporate emissions reduction targets.

The conference in France will be the biggest AI gathering since the UK’s AI safety summit at Bletchley Park last November, which ended with an agreement between leading tech firms and governments on testing the most powerful AI models. The Bletchley gathering began with a joint declaration from the UK, the US, the EU, Australia and China that AI poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity.

Bouverot added that the discussion around AI had altered since Bletchley. “The global discourse on AI has already changed,” she said. “We hear much less about the existential risks of AI, or so-called high risks. We hear about a potential bubble. We hear about what the latest developments are. That’s part of what we’re trying to do, to help change that discourse. So maybe it’s less fascinating, but it’s more concrete.”

The French summit, which follows a smaller gathering in Seoul in May, will be called the AI Action Summit, with preliminary work focusing on five issues: deploying AI in public, including ensuring all countries have access to the technology; adapting the world of work to AI; trust, which includes building agreement on approaches to safety; innovation, such as tackling the issue of using copyrighted work in AI models; and global AI governance.

Cover photo: Google and Microsoft have both said their AI strategies rely on energy-hungry datacentres to develop and operate AI models. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty