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Sam Altman's Lies About ChatGPT Are Growing Bolder
- lawn 1y ago[flagged]
- HenryBemis 1y agoWhataboutism is a great hobby, right? To the point of Altman, I keep writing in HN that 'where money can be made, money will be made'. Of course he will lie. And of course he will tell the truth. He will pick the right thing to say at the right (convenient) moment. His job is not to tell the truth. His job is to say and do whatever he can (enough to stay out of jail) to make the most money for himself and his partners/shareholders/etc. (but mostly for himself). I came across to Sex Pistols lyrics before I listened to their music. The lines that have impressed (and etched in my memory) the most are: How many ways to get what you want I use the best, I use the rest I use the N.M.E. I use anarchy So.. yeah..
- LeoPanthera 1y agoYour parent comment is in no way whataboutism. In fact it's probably the opposite, since they're criticizing both Altman and Trump and Musk.
- tompccs 1y agoThe environmental story about AI is extremely boring and I wish it would stop being brought up. Every technological development since the industrial revolution has increased human demand for energy in some way. It's only the environmental movement, which actively shut down nuclear power plants, which wants human energy consumption to be reduced for cultish reasons. If we'd ignored anti-nuclear activists in the 70s none of this would be a problem.
- apeescape 1y agoAt least some of the anti-nuclear movement back then was directed against old and unsafe nuclear plants, and for good reason. These activists achieved their goal, as modern plants are very safe. AFAICT, modern day anti-nuclear movement is a bit different to that.
- funnym0nk3y 1y agoYeah, but the nuclear waste would be a problem. The cost would be a problem too. I don't get why some people won't get that nuclear is not the solution to the energy problem. Nuclear is one of the most expensive energy sources, and that's without the cost of long term storage of burnt fuel. Without the cost of health issues in mining areas. The call for energy consumption reduction is not "for cultish reasons", it's because of climate change that's already screwing us.
- fragmede 1y agowhy is the cost a problem in and of itself?
- funnym0nk3y 1y agoBecause cost is an incentive to do or not to do things. You know, not everyone can have everything.
- lawn 1y agoMany environmentalists revert back to criticizing nuclear based on cost but if they really put the environment first that should logically not be a big deal for them.
- n4r9 1y ago> He suggests we ignore the warming planet because AI will solve that niggling issue in due course. Bloody hell. Does he really? If so that perfectly encapsulates what scares me about his approach.
- JimDabell 1y ago> Bloody hell. Does he really? No. Follow the link in the article and read his own words.
- n4r9 1y agoI read Altman's "Gentle Signularity" post when it was published. I didn't see mention of the environment. So I assumed the linked article was referencing some other statement Altman had made.
- kingstnap 1y ago> Altman did not offer any evidence for these claims and failed to mention where his data comes from. Presumably, as CEO, he is a first-party source. Also, I mean, water usage is relative. How much water does a person who chats all day use compared to someone who eats a burger every day? Electricity is also relatively clean as a power source. We would technically all be much greener if we sat naked in shoebox apartments all day playing video games, streaming videos, and chatting with AI instead of doing actually resource-intensive things like flying around and manufacturing.
- tecleandor 1y agoHe's not a first-party source about energy or water use, he's not the utilities provider (except for certain small percentage, like the dirty gas turbines they're buying, I guess). He could easily have said: "In our XXX data center we spend xxxx kWh a month, xxx cubic meters of water go in, xxx go out, we do XXX billions of tokens, so x cost per token." Then people can say if he's missing information or he's not taking certain factors in consideration. "their essay for them requires 0.000085 gallons of water" means nothing. What's an essay? How big? What model is it using? What are you considering for the water consumption?
- hansmayer 1y ago> Presumably, as CEO, he is a first-party source. So you're suggesting we should blindly trust him? Whereas everyone else would need to bring in the data, to you know, actually substantiate the claims ?
- JimDabell 1y agoTheir reason for claiming he’s lying appears to be based upon external estimates about GPT-3 from years ago. Yes, it’s entirely reasonable to believe Altman over them.
- hansmayer 1y agoI don't think that's the only reason, and it's not the only time he gave out some, mildly put, unverified information.
- noduerme 1y agoThis is the old made new again. History is cluttered with hucksters who sold some product they hyped as being good for humanity. When you get right down to it, there's a lot of stuff you can do that's good for yourself that isn't necessarily good for everyone else, and/or has unpredictable side effects and external costs. Good people don't do those things without figuring out the risks and minimizing the damage. Bad people do them for the money and then try to justify them afterwards. Are "good" and "bad" too reductive? Substitute your own phrasing for your own moral code. I think most people inherently understand what is right and wrong - and some people choose to do what's wrong. This framework makes it exceptionally easy to see who is a good or bad person. Musk wants to colonize Mars not for humanity, but for the continuation of his own genetic line. Hence, Martian citizens won't argue amongst themselves (he thinks). (Stupidly). Altman is the same type of hedonistic, narcissistic monster who would leave humanity behind. Their motto is "après moi le déluge".
- ben30 1y agoThe irony is quite striking, just as ChatGPT can generate confident-sounding but inaccurate information, Altman appears to be presenting unsubstantiated claims about his company’s environmental impact. Both involve presenting information without reliable backing, though the consequences differ - one misleads users in conversations, the other potentially misleads stakeholders and the public about environmental responsibility.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- diogolsq 1y agoSpot check: "OpenAI has claimed that as of December 2025, ChatGPT has 300 million weekly active users generating 1 billion messages per day. " **should be December of 2024 **, my brain bugged there.
- hmdai 1y ago[flagged]
- hansmayer 1y agoNo man, we're more like 'Altman-skeptic', that's the key to understand the discussion here.
- sharpshadow 1y agoIs this a kind of new measurement with the water consumption? The water flows back, gets purified and into the system again. In this case it does not even get dirty. Should it not be just extra energy consumption, to purify the water, instead of it’s own metric?
- funnym0nk3y 1y agoWater usage in humid regions is not a problem (and not nearly as efficient for cooling). Is a problem when consumption gets so high that ground water levels change or fossile ground water is used.
- bob1029 1y agoThey could be using evaporative cooling towers. It is entirely possible to run a data center with a minimal fixed amount of water if the cost of power and real estate are not a concern.
- thefz 1y agoYou can't really re-circulate the same water or else it needs to be cooled again, and dumping it back will destroy wildlife. Fishes especially are very sensitive to temperature swings in the water.
- leoedin 1y agoUnfortunately the moment the environment and energy are involved, journalism falls apart. "Water consumption" is a meaningless metric if it 's not accompanied by other information - location, energy intensity of water, source of water, where the water goes next. None of this stuff is ever included. A mill next to a river "consumes" the water that turns its wheel, but then immediately releases it back into the river. That's very different to a cooling tower that turns that water into vapour and releases it into the air. Which is the data centre doing? Assuming the data centre isn't actively depleting groundwater, the only important number is how much energy it consumes (including for water related activities). Perhaps also power per unit of compute. In a lot of places in the world, using water for cooling is likely to be more efficient than an equivalent heat pump - so should be celebrated!
- 1y ago
- dgb23 1y agoThe article is quite aggressive. I think that comes from a general frustration that I share with the author. It feels like people (in power) increasingly get away with bullshit. Whether it‘s straight up dishonesty, groupthink or ideological, is besides the point. The bigger issue is that it repeatedly drags down discourse and makes it way too hard to solve problems. And we have problems. We‘re facing some of the greatest challenges humans have ever faced. But we continously have to fight self-imposed distractions.
- hansmayer 1y ago> The article is quite aggressive. I think that comes from a general frustration that I share with the author. Honestly, it's quite refreshing to see some honest reporting beginning to surface in the general media. And the problem is, this sort of getting away with bullshit then trickles down and sort of impacts the society as a whole, as the lower echelons begin to emulate such behaviour.
- bagacrap 1y agoRather than getting away with it, people gain power through bullshit. Sam seems to model himself after Elon, the most effective bs artist out there (even if you or I don't fall for it, humanity collectively has decided to hand him the greatest amount of capital for a pretty modest amount of actual economic impact).
- JimDabell 1y agoIs the entire basis of claiming he’s lying the disagreement between his figures and external estimates? It’s pretty bold to dismiss the person who is actually in possession of solid information in favour of external estimates made in the absence of information.
- hansmayer 1y agoI think it's more about the person's own credibility. It's not the first time he throws out very bold claims, despite being in possession of "solid information", as you say.
- n4r9 1y agoLet's not forget he was literally fired as CEO on the basis of not being candid to the board, with suggestions that he'd outright lied to them.
- rendall 1y agoThis media frenzy has the same structure as the crypto panic from a year or two ago: Step 1: New tech emerges and grows fast. Step 2: Media fixates on energy use or resource costs, often with shaky math or cherry-picked comparisons. Step 3: Worst-case assumptions are broadcast as certainty. Step 4: Tech becomes politicized and moralized. Energy use framed as inherently unethical rather than context-dependent. Gizmodo calling Altman’s numbers “lies” fits this pattern. Maybe he’s lowballing. But framing it like environmental villainy rather than corporate spin or PR vagueness turns it into another purity test. Same thing happened with Bitcoin, and later it turned out the real story was more nuanced (e.g., surplus energy, shift to PoS, geographic concentration, etc.). It’s another round of the same playbook.
- joegibbs 1y agoThe water argument is way overblown. Even based on the worst figures from the article "OpenAI’s older model would be using 31 million liters of water per day, or 8.18 million gallons" - this is 2 billion gallons of water per year. A single Californian pistachio grower uses 130 billion gallons a year, likely more than the entire AI industry, for quite a niche crop. Don't even think about the water usage of staples like cotton or beef. Also, before the AI boom there were still huge numbers of GPUs using the same water and power that AI was using to run things like Netflix and YouTube (not exactly vital for human existence) - and still are - yet AI is treated like unique sin against the environment.
- TheNewsIsHere 1y agoCould you cite the source on your claim that a single pistachio farmer uses 130 billion-with-a-b gallons of water a year, please? Do you mean a particular farm, or “any” farmer in the abstract?
- lewispollard 1y agoSeems to be referencing this Forbes article, specifically talking about The Wonderful Company: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2021/11/21/how-much-is-water-worth-why-a-billionaire-owned-stake-in-a-california-water-bank-could-be-worth-more-than-1-billion/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2021/11/21/how-m...
- TheNewsIsHere 1y agoI suspected this was about a singular case. Any typical pistachio farm doesn’t need anywhere near that kind of water. Here we’d be talking about “the corporate name” in pistachios. That’s a very different thing from what “a” typical pistachio farmer needs. I submit the original comment is cherry-picking to make their argument. A pistachio tree needs something like (on average) 60 gallons of water a day. For one 365-day year that is 21,900 gallons/tree/year. That’s a lot of water, of course. But most farms do not have in excess of 5.39 million pistachio trees (using the 130 billion gallon number).
- tim333 1y agoThe article is a bit weird - says lies are growing bolder, then Altman says "0.000085 gallons of water" per query and then calculates that's 31 million gallons per year. Which is quite a lot of water but doesn't show Altman is lying. It seems more the author doesn't like Altman and is trying to show he's lying but is not doing a very good job at doing so. And other bollocks - Altman advocates UBI but knows it won't work and then links an article not showing that. I think the article much more convincingly shows Gizmodo lying than Altman, not that I especially trust the latter.
- msgodel 1y agoKind of weird to complain about the number rather than the wastefulness of evaporation cooling.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago[flagged]
- NetRunnerSu 1y agoThis water debate reminds me of a science fiction project, Chain://Universe. Their latest story, Web://Reflect, explores a future where thinking itself has a resource cost. In that 2090s world, consciousness runs on blockchain ("Mental Smart Chain"), and every cognitive process burns "Gas" (paid in MSCoin). It's a stark look at how tech monopolies could commodify existence, where even basic thought becomes a luxury. The underlying theory (IPWT) offers a fascinating, verifiable take on digital consciousness. Worth a peek if resource allocation in tech futures interests you. Main repo: https://github.com/dmf-archive/dmf-archive.github.io https://github.com/dmf-archive/dmf-archive.github.io IPWT theory: https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT
- sillyfluke 1y ago>It's a stark look at how tech monopolies could commodify existence, Since you didn't mention it, the latest Black Mirror also covers this (episode 1?). You might like it.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoAnother example re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270187