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 water use are “totally bogus,” though he acknowledged it was a real problem when “we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers.”
“Now that we don’t, 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 “energy consumption — not per query, but in total, because the world is now using so much artificial intelligence.” In his view, this means the world must “move towards nuclear power or wind and solar very quickly.”
There is no legal requirement for technology companies to disclose how much energy and water they use, so researchers have tried 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’s accurate to say that a single ChatGPT query currently uses the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone battery charges, to which Altman replied, “There’s no way it’s anywhere near that much.”
Altman also complained that many discussions of ChatGPT’s energy consumption 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 make an inference query.”
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“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman said. “It takes about 20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time to become smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people who have ever lived, learning not to be eaten by predators and learning to figure out science and whatever, 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 relative to a human? And presumably AI has already caught up in energy efficiency, measured that way.”
You can watch the full interview below. The conversation about water and energy consumption begins around 26:35.