It’s a happy day for fans of AI moguls publishing blog posts looking forward to “The Gentle Singularity“.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is that mogul, reassuring everyone that in the 2030s “people will still love their families, express their creativity, play games, and swim in lakes”, and promising that “we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other…”
We’ll let you read on to the part where space colonisation and “true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces” hove into view. But another Altman claim is interesting: his defence of AI’s environmental sustainability.
“People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses,” he wrote.
“The average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.”
This needs a bit of extra maths though. ChatGPT had around 800 million weekly active users in April this year.
Having adjusted the numbers – Altman’s oven estimate was a little off – if those users averaged one daily query, that would be 272 megawatt-hours of energy and 68,000 gallons of water every day. Around 25.2k hours of oven use and 52.2m teaspoons of water.
But if those users averaged five or 10 daily queries, and if the number of users grew by 100 million, 200 million etc… well, we’ll let you do those maths.
