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

Sustainable AI Group, the company co-founded by former Salesforce sustainability manager Boris Gamazaychikov, has released a resource for measuring the energy and emissions produced by proprietary artificial intelligence models. 

The approach, called CLEER (or Closed-model Latent Energy Estimation Range), will be available as a free, open resource that Sustainable AI Group said will become more accurate as more organizations use it.

The methodology converts a company’s use of tokens — the text processed by enterprise AI models from the likes of Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI — into energy and greenhouse gas emissions estimates.

“In the case of a sustainability professional, pretty much every one they use would apply,” said Gamazaychikov, co-founder and CEO of Sustainable AI Group.  

E-commerce marketplace Etsy, which helped Sustainable AI Group design and test CLEER, is one of the first customers, along with private equity firm Hg and tax software company Sovos. 

“When new environmental challenges emerge, we don’t wait for the industry to give us new answers,” said Chelsea Mozen, head of impact and sustainability at Etsy. “We test new approaches, learn what works and share those insights so others can move forward with us.”

Etsy previously built its own approach for measuring the emissions associated with its cloud computing services, which it published for other companies to use. Etsy is one of the few companies to explicitly break out emissions for its digital operations as part of its broader emissions disclosures for purchased goods and services. 

CLEER is available for free, but companies can also license specific datasets to use in their existing carbon accounting systems on an ongoing basis — which is what Etsy plans to do. 

The back story

CLEER builds on the Sustainable AI Group co-founders’ previous work on calculating the energy and emissions of widely available AI models, published in the AI Energy Score resource. CLEER uses information for more than 20 open models to create proxies for the closed models that many companies license, and its estimates are based on that exercise.

As AI model companies disclose more data, CLEER’s data set can be updated with actual information rather than estimates. “This means that if a model provider publishes trustworthy model-specific measurements, these can replace the corresponding CLEER estimates without requiring users to rebuild their accounting approach,” Sustainable AI Group said.

CLEER isn’t strictly a measurement methodology; it also offers a way for companies to compare the relative performance of different AI models. Sustainable AI Group found, for example, that model choices for certain tasks can affect energy consumption by more than 30 percent. More often than not, the cheaper AI models had higher estimated energy needs, according to the CLEER technical analysis. 

Sustainable AI Group is working on a CLEER integration for Watershed, a platform used by about 800 companies. Watershed is working on a complementary framework to inform how companies account for AI emissions, and the two companies will collaborate. Sustainable AI Group is exploring other software integration partnerships.

“We want this data to go into the places where sustainability professionals are already doing their accounting,” Gamazaychikov said.

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