In episode 120 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Sasha Luccioni.Sasha is the AI and Climate Lead at HuggingFace, where she spearheads research, consulting, and capacity-building to elevate the sustainability of AI systems. A founding member of Climate Change AI (CCAI) and a board member of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Sasha is passionate about catalyzing impactful change, organizing events and serving as a mentor to under-represented minorities within the AI community.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach Daniel at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (00:43) Sasha’s background* (01:52) How Sasha became interested in sociotechnical work* (03:08) Larger models and theory of change for AI/climate work* (07:18) Quantifying emissions for ML systems* (09:40) Aggregate inference vs training costs* (10:22) Hardware and data center locations* (15:10) More efficient hardware vs. bigger models — Jevons paradox* (17:55) Uninformative experiments, takeaways for individual scientists, knowledge sharing, failure reports* (27:10) Power Hungry Processing: systematic comparisons of ongoing inference costs* (28:22) General vs. task-specific models* (31:20) Architectures and efficiency* (33:45) Sequence-to-sequence architectures vs. decoder-only* (36:35) Hardware efficiency/utilization* (37:52) Estimating the carbon footprint of Bloom and lifecycle assessment* (40:50) Stable Bias* (46:45) Understanding model biases and representations* (52:07) Future work* (53:45) Metaethical perspectives on benchmarking for AI ethics* (54:30) “Moral benchmarks”* (56:50) Reflecting on “ethicality” of systems* (59:00) Transparency and ethics* (1:00:05) Advice for picking research directions* (1:02:58) OutroLinks:* Sasha’s homepage and Twitter* Papers read/discussed* Climate Change / Carbon Emissions of AI Models* Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning* Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?* Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning* CodeCarbon* Responsible AI* Stable Bias: Analyzing Societal Representations in Diffusion Models* Metaethical Perspectives on ‘Benchmarking’ AI Ethics* Measuring Data* Mind your Language (Model): Fact-Checking LLMs and their Role in NLP Research and Practice Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe