The paper highlights that as Large Language Models grow in capability and prevalence, their environmental footprint is increasing, yet the machine learning community lacks standardized carbon accounting practices. An automated review of 5,285 NeurIPS 2025 papers shows almost no reporting of environmental impact. To address this, the authors propose standardized sustainability metrics for training efficiency, heuristics for estimating inference carbon costs, a software tool called carbonbenchmark for tracking emissions, and the SMAJ framework to encourage prioritizing computational efficiency and environmental accountability over marginal accuracy gains.
By Lachlan McGinness, Dan Pagendam, Robert Offner
arXiv:2606. 07632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proper accounting of the energy requirements and environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI) systems is necessary for researchers, developers, policy makers, and users to assess the barriers to building systems at scale.
By Jared Fernandez, Clara Na, Yonatan Bisk, Constantine Samaras, Emma Strubell
The paper analyzes the environmental footprint of machine learning model training, focusing on large language models and their hardware. It finds that energy use and environmental impacts have risen exponentially over the past decade, even when employing carbon‑efficient electricity and more efficient hardware. The study argues that optimization strategies alone cannot curb these impacts due to a rebound effect, and stresses the need to evaluate hardware life‑cycle impacts and integrate environmental metrics into NLP research practices.
By Cl\'ement Morand (STL), Anne-Laure Ligozat (ENSIIE, LISN, STL), Aur\'elie N\'ev\'eol (STL, LISN)
arXiv:2609.00847v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As machine learning and artificial intelligence find their way into nearly every aspect of climate, weather, and Earth system modeling, it is worth p...
By Filippo Dainelli, Amirpasha Mozaffari, Marina Casta\~no, Aina Gaya i \`Avila, Llu\'is Palma Garcia, Alessio Melli, Oscar Dimdore Miles, Amanda Duarte
arXiv:2609.33965v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We describe a methodology for estimating the per-token energy cost of cloud-hosted large language model (LLM) inference, separating between i...
By Joshua Horswill, Ross Hunter, Matt Clifford, James Hall
arXiv:2608. 13730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empirical reports on the true cost of AI-intensive software development remain scarce, and the few that exist are easy to get wrong in ways that never surface in the final number.
By Victor Barros de Miranda Neves, Kiev Santos da Gama, Vinicius Cardoso Garcia
arXiv:2608. 06640v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The widespread integration of AI coding assistants offers undeniable boosts to engineering velocity.
By Michael Tran, Fred Lewis, Kun Yang, Saksham Thakur, Aditya Kini, Aditya Patil, Milad Hashemi, Parthasarathy Ranganathan
The paper explores energy-aware knowledge distillation for large language models (LLMs) used in software engineering tasks such as clone detection, vulnerability prediction, and code summarization. It shows that the commonly used FLOPs metric does not reliably reflect actual energy consumption, and that using energy-surrogate models during distillation can reduce inference energy by up to 90% and memory usage by 86% with only modest accuracy loss. The study demonstrates that guiding distillation with direct energy estimates improves the sustainability and deployability of LLMs on consumer hardware.
By Enrique Barba Roque, Lu\'is Cruz, Annibale Panichella
arXiv:2609.10226v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and code generation, raising the prospect that they could assist in...
By Leilei Ding, Shumin Wang, Yuting Huang, Fanqi Wan, Yinmin Zhang, Qi Han, Yiming Xu, Feiyuan Zhang, Xiaomeng Chu, Guoliang You, Wuyang Zhang, Daxin Jiang, Yanyong Zhang
arXiv:2607. 05408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The environmental impact of training large language models (LLMs) is increasingly scrutinised, yet most published estimates focus on operational energy and disclose little about manufacturing (embodied) emissions, water consumption, or the underlying highperformance computing (HPC) infrastructure.
By Marc L\'eobet, Pierre-Fran\c{c}ois Lavall\'ee, Jean-Pierre Lorr\'e
arXiv:2610.01619v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The environmental impact of deep learning has attracted increasing attention over the past decade. Existing studies mainly focus on the energy and ca...
By Constance Douwes, Paul Magron, Romain Serizel
arXiv:2511. 00802v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With data-driven development now widely adopted, online A/B testing is an established method for measuring the effects of new technologies.
By Jie JW Wu, Ayanda Patrick Herlihy, Ahmad Saleem Mirza, Ali Afoud, Fatemeh Fard