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Integrating AI Responsibly: Pitt's Commitment to Sustainability

The University of Pittsburgh is committed to responsible innovation, integrating advanced AI technologies like PittGPT while driving toward carbon neutrality by 2037, as outlined in the Pitt Sustainability Plan. To proactively address energy consumption concerns, our strategy prioritizes streamlined inference-based operations, which significantly reduces energy use. By comparison, the energy consumed by an average AI prompt is comparable to watching TV for only 9 seconds. Beyond managing our own digital usage, Pitt is focused on the transformative power of AI: Our researchers are actively leveraging it to tackle major climate challenges, including the pioneering design of sustainable concrete.

Core Commitments & Sustainable Practices

These principles guide our deployment of Generative AI @ Pitt:

The University of Pittsburgh is steadfast in its commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2037 and sustainability, which balances equity, environment, and economics.

PittGPT is designed with sustainability at its core, using inference-based operations through Azure AI Foundry, which significantly reduces energy consumption compared to training models from scratch and is powered by renewable electricity.

The University actively monitors the environmental footprint of Generative AI offerings in alignment with our climate goals, ensuring ongoing dialogue about technological advancement and environmental responsibility.

Strategic partnerships with vendors like Anthropic, AWS, Google, and Microsoft are based on their commitments to renewable energy and carbon reduction, which supports Pitt’s Sustainability and Climate Action Plans.

Even though AI efforts and software are hosted in the cloud and thus outside the University's greenhouse gas emissions inventory boundary, sustainability criteria guide decision-making.

Pitt researchers at the University are showcasing AI’s potential to contribute positively via Responsible Data Science and designing more-sustainable concrete.