How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference

As large language models (LLMs) spread across industries, understanding their environmental footprint at the inference level is no longer optional; it is essential. However, most existing studies exclude proprietary models, overlook infrastructural variability and overhead, or focus solely on training, even as inference increasingly dominates AI's environmental impact. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel infrastructure-aware benchmarking framework for quantifying the environmental footprint of LLM inference across 30 state-of-the-art models as deployed in commercial data centers. Our framework combines public API performance data with region-specific environmental multipliers and statistical inference of hardware configurations. We additionally utilize cross-efficiency Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to rank models by performance relative to environmental cost. Our results show that o3 and DeepSeek-R1 emerge as the most energy-intensive models, consuming over 33 Wh per long prompt, more than 70 times the consumption of GPT-4.1 nano, and that Claude-3.7 Sonnet ranks highest in eco-efficiency. While a single short GPT-4o query consumes 0.43 Wh, scaling this to 700 million queries/day results in substantial annual environmental impacts. These include electricity use comparable to 35,000 U.S. homes, freshwater evaporation matching the annual drinking needs of 1.2 million people, and carbon emissions requiring a Chicago-sized forest to offset. These findings illustrate a growing paradox: although individual queries are efficient, their global scale drives disproportionate resource consumption. Our study provides a standardized, empirically grounded methodology for benchmarking the sustainability of LLM deployments, laying a foundation for future environmental accountability in AI development and sustainability standards.

Visual Reasoning Evaluation of Grok, Deepseek Janus, Gemini, Qwen, Mistral, and ChatGPT

Traditional evaluations of multimodal large language models (LLMs) have been limited by their focus on single-image reasoning, failing to assess crucial aspects like contextual understanding, reasoning stability, and uncertainty calibration. This study addresses these limitations by introducing a novel benchmark that integrates multi-image reasoning tasks with rejection-based evaluation and positional bias detection. To evaluate these dimensions, we further introduce entropy as a novel metric for quantifying reasoning consistency across reordered answer variants. We applied this benchmark to assess Grok 3, ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-o1, Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental, DeepSeek Janus models, Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct, QVQ-72B-Preview, and Pixtral 12B across eight visual reasoning tasks, including difference spotting and diagram interpretation. Our findings reveal ChatGPT-o1 leading in overall accuracy (82.5\%) and rejection accuracy (70.0\%), closely followed by Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental (70.8\%). QVQ-72B-Preview demonstrated superior rejection accuracy (85.5\%). Notably, Pixtral 12B (51.7\%) showed promise in specific domains, while Janus models exhibited challenges in bias and uncertainty calibration, reflected in low rejection accuracies and high entropy scores. High entropy scores in Janus models (Janus 7B: 0.8392, Janus 1B: 0.787) underscore their susceptibility to positional bias and unstable reasoning, contrasting with the low entropy and robust reasoning of ChatGPT models. The study further demonstrates that model size is not the sole determinant of performance, as evidenced by Grok 3 underperformance despite its substantial parameter count. By employing multi-image contexts, rejection mechanisms, and entropy-based consistency metrics, this benchmark sets a new standard for evaluating multimodal LLMs, enabling a more robust and reliable assessment of next-generation AI systems.

Evaluating the Evolution of YOLO (You Only Look Once) Models: A Comprehensive Benchmark Study of YOLO11 and Its Predecessors

This study presents a comprehensive benchmark analysis of various YOLO (You Only Look Once) algorithms, from YOLOv3 to the newest addition. It represents the first research to comprehensively evaluate the performance of YOLO11, the latest addition to the YOLO family. It evaluates their performance on three diverse datasets: Traffic Signs (with varying object sizes), African Wildlife (with diverse aspect ratios and at least one instance of the object per image), and Ships and Vessels (with small-sized objects of a single class), ensuring a comprehensive assessment across datasets with distinct challenges. To ensure a robust evaluation, we employ a comprehensive set of metrics, including Precision, Recall, Mean Average Precision (mAP), Processing Time, GFLOPs count, and Model Size. Our analysis highlights the distinctive strengths and limitations of each YOLO version. For example: YOLOv9 demonstrates substantial accuracy but struggles with detecting small objects and efficiency whereas YOLOv10 exhibits relatively lower accuracy due to architectural choices that affect its performance in overlapping object detection but excels in speed and efficiency. Additionally, the YOLO11 family consistently shows superior performance in terms of accuracy, speed, computational efficiency, and model size. YOLO11m achieved a remarkable balance of accuracy and efficiency, scoring mAP50-95 scores of 0.795, 0.81, and 0.325 on the Traffic Signs, African Wildlife, and Ships datasets, respectively, while maintaining an average inference time of 2.4ms, a model size of 38.8Mb, and around 67.6 GFLOPs on average. These results provide critical insights for both industry and academia, facilitating the selection of the most suitable YOLO algorithm for diverse applications and guiding future enhancements.