2026 Teens Dream - AI Without Waste

My dream is to prevent AI from excessively consuming energy and water. While AI is a helpful tool, it uses an immense amount of energy to be trained and sustained, which is a step back from the UN goal to sustain responsible consumption and production. Instead of consuming resources unnecessarily, we need to find solutions to use less energy to train large language models, and find sustainable alternatives for the fossil fuels used for powering the computers. The first step to do this is to spread awareness. I will reach out to journalists to document the issue, clubs and organizations to connect with others passionate about this issue, and use social media to express the issue globally. Then, I will reach out to large AI corporations to propose sustainable alternatives to their current methods of training AI. I would also reach out to policy makers to create guidelines for AI’s energy and water use. The community against AI energy waste will help me with these tasks and will continue to spread information about irresponsible consumption. If the information is spread to people who truly care and people who influence policies are involved, it is possible to stop the waste that AI creates and have a useful and sustainable tool for everyone to use without guilt.