Beyond CO2 Emissions: The Overlooked Impact of Water Consumption of Information Retrieval Models

As in other fields of artificial intelligence, the information retrieval community has grown interested in investigating the power consumption associated with neural models, particularly models of search. This interest has become particularly relevant as the energy consumption of information retrieval models has risen with new neural models based on large language models, leading to an associated increase of CO2 emissions, albeit relatively low compared to fields such as natural language processing.