The environmental impact and sustainability of AI are increasingly important considerations in software engineering. The overall energy consumption of an LLM during inference (when the model is actually being used by a tester) is most directly influenced by thenumber of tokens processed. Every token generated or analyzed requires a massive amount of floating-point operations within the GPU clusters of a data center. Therefore, the "length" of the input prompt and the "length" of the AI’s response are the primary drivers of the power draw and, consequently, the carbon intensity of the query. This is a crucial concept for "Green AI" initiatives in testing; more efficient prompting—such as avoiding unnecessarily verbose context or limiting output lengths—can lead to more sustainable testing practices. While data center location (Option B) affects thetypeof energy used (renewable vs. fossil fuel), it does not determine the model's accuracy. Similarly, while cloud platforms (Option D) and session durations (Option C) play roles in operational logistics, the mathematical workload tied to token count remains the fundamental unit of energy expenditure in Generative AI.
Question # 15
Which AI approach requires feature engineering and structured data preparation?
Classical Machine Learning(which includes algorithms like Random Forests, Support Vector Machines, and Linear Regression) is characterized by its reliance onFeature Engineering. This is the process where human experts manually select, extract, and transform raw data into a set of "features" or variables that the algorithm can process. For instance, in a classical ML model predicting software defects, a tester might have to manually define features like "lines of code changed" or "number of previous bugs." In contrast,Deep Learningand its subset,Generative AI(Options B and D), utilize "Representation Learning." This means the multi-layered neural networks automatically identify and extract the relevant features from raw, often unstructured data (like text or images) without explicit human instruction.Symbolic AI(Option A) is based on hard-coded logical rules rather than data-driven learning. Understanding this distinction is fundamental for testers, as it determines the level of data preparation required: Classical ML requires high human effort in data structuring, while GenAI requires high effort in prompt engineering and grounding.