AI's energy problem is a systems problem

Recently, I came across an article suggesting that powerful AI tools could run on the number of watts drawn from the average smartphone battery. Given my interest in these technologies, I thought it deserved some further investigation.What I found was that there are four well-understood engineering techniques that can reduce the energy used per useful AI output by ~100x. That's a lot. So without burying the lede, what are those techniques?Training models more efficiently (smaller models, better data)Replacing dense transformer arithmetic with leaner algorithmsRunning those algorithms on hardware that stops shuffling data back and forth unnecessarilyServing requests intelligently rather than wastefully These aren't exactly exotic techniques, and they're all – in principle, at least – combinable. My feeds are full of either AI boosterism (usually LinkedIn) or AI doomerism (everywhere else). It's either going to solve climate change if we build enough data centres, or an environmental…