About this project

The thesis

Most AI users have not seen real sustainability numbers. The lectures are long and the data is dry. Escape rooms force engagement: you cannot leave the room until the data is in your head. Information retention through earned discovery, not passive scrolling.

The bar for every number

Every statistic in every room is cited inline and in this page. Where studies disagree, a range is shown. No invented numbers. No round-up nudges.

Room 1: The Server Vault

• BLOOM 176B lifecycle breakdown (manufacturing 22.2%, dynamic compute 48.9%, idle 28.9%). Source: Hugging Face efficiency primer.
• Grid carbon intensity range across regions, 5x to 10x. Source: IEA Energy and AI report.
• City-level intensity figures are illustrative averages. Real-time intensity varies through the day.

Room 2: Your AI Diet

• ChatGPT-style query roughly 2.9 Wh, web search roughly 0.3 Wh. Source: Hugging Face efficiency primer. Treat as order-of-magnitude, not vendor-published.
• Batched inference roughly 3x more energy efficient than sequential single calls. Source: Hugging Face efficiency primer.
• Real vs greenwash behaviors compiled from peer-reviewed sustainability literature and the UNEP press release on AI environmental impact.

Room 3: The Water Room

• Cooling water 0.18 to 1.1 liters per kWh. Source: Hugging Face efficiency primer.
• Hardware lifetime as the dominant lever (manufacturing carbon at 50 to 70 percent of lifecycle). Source: Hugging Face efficiency primer.
• The moral choice has no single right answer. The point is that the trade-off gets weighed at all.

Sources cited across the project

1. IEA, Energy and AI report. iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai
2. Hugging Face, AI environment primer and BLOOM lifecycle. huggingface.co/blog/sasha/ai-environment-primer
3. Patterson et al., Carbon emissions and large neural network training. arxiv.org/abs/2104.10350
4. Luccioni et al., Power hungry processing. arxiv.org/abs/2311.16863
5. UNEP, AI has an environmental problem. unep.org press release
6. EU Digital Strategy, AI Act regulatory framework. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu

Privacy and sustainability

This site stores nothing about you. No cookies, no analytics, no AI calls per play. Saves are local to your browser only. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages free tier. The whole project is under 100 KB per room.

Built by

Sameer Goel. sameer-goel.com