Sam Altman would like to remind you that people use a lot of energy too | TechCrunch

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed concerns about AI’s environmental impact this week while speaking at an event hosted by The Indian Express.

First, Altman — who was in India for a major AI summit — said concerns about AI’s use of water were “totally bogus,” though he acknowledged that it was a real problem when “we’re used to doing evaporative cooling in data centers.”

“Now that we don’t do that, you see these things on the Internet where, ‘Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for every query,’ or whatever,” Altman said. “This is completely untrue, completely insane, no connection to reality.

He added that it’s “fair” to be concerned about “power consumption — not per query, but overall because the world is using AI so much now.” In his view, this means the world must “move very quickly to nuclear or wind and solar.”

There is no legal requirement for tech companies to disclose how much energy and water they use, so the researchers tried to study it independently. Data centers are also related to rising electricity prices.

Referring to a previous interview with Bill Gates, the interviewer asked if it was correct to say that one ChatGPT query currently uses the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone battery charges, to which Altman replied, “There’s no way it’s even close to that.”

Altman also complained that many discussions of ChatGPT’s power consumption are “unfair”, especially when they focus on “how much power it takes to train an AI model relative to what it costs a human to execute a single inference query”.

“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a person,” Altman said. “It takes about 20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time to become smart. Not only that, but it took the very extended evolution of 100 billion people who have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever else to produce you.”

So, in his opinion, a fair comparison is: “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it use when its model is trained to answer that question, versus a human? And probably AI has already caught up to the baseline of energy efficiency, measured that way.”

You can watch the entire interview below. The conversation about water and energy consumption starts around 26:35.