New tool helps Etsy peer into the ‘black box’ of AI emissions

This news is about corporate sustainability accounting, not home energy upgrades, but here's what happened. A company called Sustainable AI Group has released a free tool called CLEER that estimates the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions of commercial AI models, like those from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic. Because these companies keep the inner workings of their AI models private, businesses that use them have had a hard time knowing how much energy their AI use actually burns. CLEER fills that gap by using data from more than 20 public AI models as stand-ins to estimate the footprint of the private ones.

Etsy helped build and test the tool and is one of its first users, along with the private equity firm Hg and tax software company Sovos. Etsy has a history of publishing its own methods for tracking emissions from cloud computing, and it plans to license CLEER's data for its ongoing carbon reporting. The tool's analysis also found that cheaper AI models often use more energy, and that choosing one AI model over another for a task can change energy use by more than 30 percent.

For homeowners, this doesn't connect to home energy upgrades or rebates. It's a look at how companies are starting to measure and manage the climate footprint of their AI use, an area that has been mostly a black box until now.