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