Alibaba Cloud to Start Second Data Center in South Korea by June
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will open a second data center in South Korea by the end of June, accelerating its multibillion-dollar bet on artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
The new facility is part of a 380 billion yuan ($52.9 billion) investment in AI and cloud infrastructure announced earlier this year, an Alibaba spokesperson said. The expansion comes in response to growing demand from South Korean businesses for cloud and AI services, the company said in a statement Thursday.
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14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
China's extended 618 shopping fest fails to stir excitement
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Yahoo
25 minutes ago
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Amazon's bleak job update exposes major AI warning for Aussie workers: 'Will reduce'
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Fast Company
36 minutes ago
- Fast Company
AI users have to choose between accuracy or sustainability
PREMIUM New research shows the smarter and more capable AI models become, the larger their environmental impact. [Images: hramovnick/Adobe Stock; yLemon/Adobe Stock] BY Listen to this Article More info 0:00 / 2:38 Cheap or free access to AI models keeps improving, with Google the latest firm to make its newest models available to all users, not just paying ones. But that access comes with one cost: the environment. In a new study, German researchers tested 14 large language models (LLMs) of various sizes from leading developers such as Meta, Alibaba, and others. Each model answered 1,000 difficult academic questions spanning topics from world history to advanced mathematics. The tests ran on a powerful, energy-intensive NVIDIA A100 GPU, using a specialized framework to precisely measure electricity consumption per answer. This data was then converted into carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, providing a clear comparison of each model's environmental impact. The researchers found that many LLMs are far more powerful than needed for everyday queries. Smaller, less energy-hungry models can answer many factual questions just as well. The carbon and water footprints of a single prompt vary dramatically depending on model size and task type. Prompts requiring reasoning, which force models to 'think aloud,' are especially polluting because they generate many more tokens. One model, Cogito, topped the accuracy table—answering nearly 85% of questions correctly—but produced three times more emissions than similar-sized models, highlighting a trade-off rarely visible to AI developers or users. (Cogito did not respond to a request for comment.) 'Do we really need a 400-billion parameter GPT model to answer when World War II was, for example,' says Maximilian Dauner, a researcher at Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences and one of the study's authors. advertisement The final deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Friday, June 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today. Subscribe to see the rest. Already Subscribed? Login. GET UNLIMITED ACCESS TO FAST COMPANY Enjoy the latest trends from the world-leading progressive business media brand just $1 Join for $1 Sign up for our weekly tech digest. SIGN UP This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Privacy Policy ABOUT THE AUTHOR Chris Stokel-Walker is a contributing writer at Fast Company who focuses on the tech sector and its impact on our daily lives—online and offline. He has explored how the WordPress drama has implications for the wider web, how AI web crawlers are pushing sites offline, as well as stories about ordinary people doing incredible things, such as the German teen who set up a MySpace clone with more than a million users. More Explore Topics Artificial Intelligence
