The Environmental Impacts of Language Model Training Keep Rising Now is the Time to Catch Impacts on the Rebound

Recent Machine Learning (ML) approaches have shown increased performance on benchmarks at the cost of escalating compute demands. Hardware, algorithmic and carbon optimizations have been proposed to curb energy use and environmental impacts. We estimate the environmental impacts associated with training models documented in the Epoch AI database over the last decade, with a particular focus on impacts associated with Large Language Models and the hardware used to train them. We find that energy use and environmental impacts associated with training ML models have increased exponentially, even when considering impact reduction strategies such as using less carbon intensive electricity mixes or more efficient hardware. Optimization strategies do not mitigate the impacts induced by model training, suggesting rebound effect. We show that the impacts of hardware must be considered over the entire life cycle rather than the sole use phase in order to avoid impact shifting. Our study demonstrates that increasing efficiency alone does not ensure sustainability. There is an urgent need to systematically integrate environmental impacts in NLP evaluation practices to better inform the community and support the use of impact as a feature in research planning and decision making.