Scaling Laws: AI and Energy: What Do We Know? What Are We Learning?
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mosharaf Chowdhury, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and Director of the ML Energy lab, and Dan Zhou, former Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Lincoln Lab, MIT Supercomputing Center, and MIT CSAIL, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the energy costs of AI.
They break down exactly how much energy fuels a single ChatGPT query, why this is difficult to figure out, how we might improve energy efficiency, and what kinds of policies might minimize AI’s growing energy and environmental costs.
Leo Wu provided excellent research assistance on this podcast.
Read more from Mosharaf:
- The ML Energy Initiative
- “We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard,” in MIT Technology Review
Read more from Dan:
- “From Words to Watts: Benchmarking the Energy Costs of Large Language Model Inference,” in Proc. IEEE High Perform. Extreme Comput. Conf. (HPEC)
- “A Green(er) World for A.I.,” in IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gina's a muncher. |
| 0:02.3 | Jackson Nippler. |
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| 0:08.1 | But not for too long. |
| 0:10.2 | And Harry? |
| 0:11.9 | Thank you, Harry. |
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| 1:05.3 | It's the Lawfare podcast. |
| 1:07.3 | I'm Alan Rosenstein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, and a senior |
| 1:11.7 | editor and research director at Lawfare. Today we're bringing you something a little different, |
| 1:16.5 | an episode from our new podcast series, Scaling Laws. It's a creation of Lawfare and the University |
| 1:21.5 | of Texas School of Law, where we're tackling the most important AI and policy questions, |
| 1:26.4 | from new legislation on Capitol Hill to the latest breakthroughs that are happening in the labs. |
| 1:31.1 | We cut through the hype to get you up to speed on the rules, standards, and ideas |
| 1:35.0 | shaping the future of this pivotal technology. |
| 1:37.6 | If you enjoy this episode, you can find and subscribe to scaling laws wherever you get your podcasts, |
| 1:42.7 | and follow us on X and Blue Sky. |
... |
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