Towards Sustainable Web Agents: A Plea for Transparency and Dedicated Metrics for Energy Consumption

TL;DR

This paper explores the energy and CO2 costs of web agents, emphasizing the need for transparency and dedicated metrics to evaluate their sustainability, which is currently underexplored.

Contribution

It provides an initial analysis of the energy consumption of web agents and advocates for transparency and specific metrics to improve sustainability assessments.

Findings

Different development philosophies greatly affect energy use.

Lack of transparency hinders accurate energy estimation.

Call for dedicated metrics for energy and sustainability.

Abstract

Improvements in the area of large language models have shifted towards the construction of models capable of using external tools and interpreting their outputs. These so-called web agents have the ability to interact autonomously with the internet. This allows them to become powerful daily assistants handling time-consuming, repetitive tasks while supporting users in their daily activities. While web agent research is thriving, the sustainability aspect of this research direction remains largely unexplored. We provide an initial exploration of the energy and CO2 cost associated with web agents. Our results show how different philosophies in web agent creation can severely impact the associated expended energy. We highlight lacking transparency regarding the disclosure of model parameters and processes used for some web agents as a limiting factor when estimating energy consumption. As such, our work advocates a change in thinking when evaluating web agents, warranting dedicated metrics for energy consumption and sustainability.