AI’s environmental impact is a growing care, but the Walking app Alltrails sees a path to coexistence
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- Hiking -App Alltrails has just released a new subscription layer with AI functions
- We asked the Chief Technology Officer of Alltrails how Alltrails reconciles the environmental impact of AI with the app’s mission statement to help people enjoy the outdoors
- He says that Alltrails takes steps to reduce energy costs and to maximize efficiency when implementing AI functions
Earlier this week we reported that the WandelApp Alltrails had launched a new subscription: Peak, a more expensive subscription plan that uses AI tools to improve your outdoor experience.
These tools include a community heatmap, a common feature on the Best fitness apps Such as alltrails and contemporaries such as Strava. The Heatmap shows where other users often walk, so you can sort paths for popularity.
Other functions are Buitenlens, which uses the camera of your phone to identify plants, insects and orientation points and trail conditions, which offers up-to-date information about not only again, but also ground conditions, Snowpack and even mosquito activity on different parts of your track.
The Alltrails Peak Subscription Tier Costs $ 79.99 / £ 79.99 (around AU $ 125) per year, probably because of the costs of the AI used.
It is known that AI is an energy-intensive technology of the most popular statistics associated with it is that Chatgpt-4 uses the equivalent of 519 ml of water, slightly more than an average bottle, per 100 words generated e-mail. This stat comes from the University of California, Riverside, in a study produced in collaboration with the Washington Post.
AI therefore does not seem to be an environmentally friendly technology to use at the moment because of the energy and cooling requirements. Alltrails, however, says that it is dedicated to maintain the outdoors that are users; The company cooperates with the NO Trace leave and one tree planted non -profit organizations and contributes 1% of its annual income to environmental organizations.
When I spoke with the Chief Technology Officer of Alltrails, James Graham, about the new subscription strokes, I also asked him if Alltrails was at odds with the environmental reports of the company.
Be careful with AI
“Great question. That is something we think about with every position we build,” Graham told me.
“Our data scientists take the time to build functions such as these more efficiently … We think about the size of the model, and for many of our functions we don’t have to use the largest, highest intensity model, so we don’t always use the top model that uses the most energy. We are very good about how we use it.”
Alltrails, it seems, tries to reduce the impact of AI’s power consumption and huge cooling requirements by using smaller, more efficient models that have been specifically developed to implement the functions with minimal impact. But Graham also thinks that as AI evolves, his requirements will decrease and tell me: “While new technology comes out, we see all the energy costs of using AI falling, and we believe that the trend will continue”, “,
While the energy requires for each Individual copy of AI use can decrease, the increasing generally The use of AI could compensate for these savings. A MIT report from January 2025 states that data centers are already good for 1-2% of global energy consumption: By 2030 this could be allegedly reached up to 21% because of the requirements for AI.
If more developers were to use smaller models and more energy -efficient processes, we can turn this terrible prediction. Although the AI tools used by Alltrails look impressive and are designed to encourage more people to spend more time outside, which may be for the benefit of the causes of the environment, worry will continue to exist about the broader use of AI and what it really means to ‘not leave a trace’.
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