- Rose App Alltrails has just published a new level of subscription with AI features
- We asked the Director of Alltrail Technology How Alltrails reconciles the environmental impact of AI with the mission statement of the application to help people enjoy the outdoors
- He says that Alltrails takes measures to reduce the cost of energy and maximize efficiency when deploying AI features
Earlier this week, we reported that Alltrail hiking applications launched a new subscription level: PEAK, a more expensive subscription plan that uses AI tools to improve your outdoor experience.
These tools include a community thermal card, a common feature on the best fitness applications such as Alltrails and Contemporaries like Strava. The thermal card shows where other users often hike, allowing you to sort the popularity trails.
The other features include the external objective, which uses the camera of your phone to identify plants, insects and benchmarks, and the path conditions, which provides up -to -date information not only on conditions, but on the ground conditions, the snowy coat and even the activity of mosquitoes on different parts of your trail.
The Alltrails PEAK subscription level costs $ 79.99 / £ 79.99 (around $ 125 in) per year, probably due to the cost of the AI used.
It is well known that AI is a technology with high energy intensity – one of the most popular statistics whose chatppt -4 uses the equivalent of 519 ml of water, a little more than one average bottle, by e -mail of 100 words generated. This statistic comes from the University of California in Riverside, in a study produced in collaboration with the Washington Post.
AI therefore does not seem to be an environmentally friendly technology to be used for the moment, due to its energy and cooling requirements. Alltrails, however, says that it is dedicated to the preservation of large spaces that its users love; The company is associated with the leave without trace and a non -profit planted tree, and contributes 1% of its annual income to environmental organizations.
When I spoke to the Director of Alltrail Technology, James Graham, new subscription levels, I also asked him if the use of AI by Alltrails was in contradiction with the environmental messaging of the company.
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“Good question. This is something we think with all the features we build,” Graham told me.
“Our scientists of data take the time to create features like this more effectively … We think of the size of the model, and for many of our features, we do not need to use the largest and highest possible model, we therefore do not always use the high-end model that consumes the most energy. We are very deliberate with the way we use it.”
Alltrails, it seems, try to mitigate the impact of EIA energy consumption and huge cooling requirements using smaller and more effective models specially developed to implement its features with a minimum impact. But Graham also thinks that for the evolution of AI, his requests will decrease, saying to me: “As the new technology comes out, we already see the energy cost of using AI, and we think that the trend will continue”, “
While energy requires for everyone The individual AI use instance may decrease, the increase overall The use of AI could compensate for these savings. A report of the MIT in January 2025 indicates that data centers already represent 1 to 2% of world energy consumption: by 2030, this could reach up to 21% due to the requests imposed on AI.
If more developers used smaller models and more energy efficient processes, we could avoid this disastrous prediction. However, while the AI tools used by Alltrails seem impressive and are designed to encourage more people to spend more time outside, which can be for the benefit of environmental causes, concerns will persist on the wider use of AI and what it really means to leave no trace ”.
