OpenAI CEO Sam Altman raised concerns about the environmental impact of artificial intelligence this week while speaking at an event organized by Indian Express.
First, Altman — who was in India for a major AI summit — said concerns about AI’s water use are “totally bogus,” though he acknowledged it was a real issue when “we were doing evaporative cooling in data centers.”
“Now that we don’t do that, you see these things online where, ‘Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for every query,’ or whatever,” Altman said. “This is completely untrue, completely crazy, nothing to do with reality.”
He added that it’s “fair” to be concerned about “power consumption — not per query, but overall, because the world is using so much AI now.” In his view, this means the world needs to “move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly”.
There is no legal requirement for tech companies to disclose how much energy and water they use, so scientists trying to study it independently. Data centers have also been linked to rising electricity prices.
Referring to a previous conversation with Bill Gates, the interviewer asked if it was accurate to say that a ChatGPT query currently uses the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone battery charges, to which Altman replied, “There’s no way it’s that much.”
Altman also complained that many discussions of ChatGPT’s energy usage are “unfair,” especially when they focus on “how much energy it takes to train an AI model, versus how much it costs a human to run an inference query.”
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“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 intelligent. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of 100 billion people who ever lived and learned not to eat from predators and learned how to understand science and everything else to produce you.”
So, in his view, the fair comparison is: “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take when its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”
You can watch the entire interview below. The discussion on water and energy use starts around 26:35.
