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Huge AI models can be halved in size without degrading performance

A way to cut the scale of artificial intelligence models by 60 per cent could save huge amounts of energy and make them more accessible

By Alex Wilkins

18 January 2023

It might be possible to have AIs like chatbots that are just as good but use less energy

salarko/Alamy

Large artificial intelligence language models, like those used to run the popular ChatGPT chatbot, can be reduced in size by more than half without losing much accuracy. This could save large amounts of energy and allow people to run the models at home, rather than in huge data centres.

Many recent advances in artificial intelligence models have come from scaling up the number of parameters: the values that each model tunes to produce outputs. OpenAI’s GPT-3, a version of which…

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