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If I'm interpreting this right it's estimating that ChatGPT's daily energy usage is enough to charge just 14,000 electric vehicles - and that's to serve in the

by simonw 1y ago

If I'm interpreting this right it's estimating that ChatGPT's daily energy usage is enough to charge just 14,000 electric vehicles - and that's to serve in the order of ~100 million daily users.

moralestapia 1y ago
I was about to post this exact thing. Seems ... low? And it will only get more efficient going forward. I don't get why this is supposed to be a big deal for infrastructure since there's definitely way more than 14,000 EVs out there and we are doing well.
- ares623 1y ago
  the infrastructure needs to go somewhere. And that somewhere needs to have access to abundant water and electricity. It just so happens those are things humans need too. Before GenAI we were on our way to optimizing this, at least to the level where the general public can turn a blind eye. It was to the point where the companies would brag about how much efficient they are. Now all that progress is gone, and we're accelerating backwards. Maybe that was all a lie too. But then who's to say the current numbers are a lie too to make the pill easier to swallow.
  - moralestapia 1y ago
    Hmm, I guess we'll have to do it the slow way ... What % of EVs on the market is 14,000?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
blibble 1y ago
> We used the figure of 0.34 watt-hours that OpenAI’s Sam Altman stated in a blog post without supporting evidence. what do you think the odds of this being accurate are? zero?
- simonw 1y ago
  Hard to say. Sam wrote that on June 10th this year: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity GPT-5 came out on 7th August. Assuming the 0.34 value was accurate in the GPT-4o era, is the number today still in the same ballpark or is it wildly different?
  - blibble 1y ago
    the "AI" industry have identified that energy usage is going to be used as a stick to beat them with if I was altman then I'd release a few small numbers to try and get influencers talking about "how little energy chatgpt uses" and he can never be accused of lying, as without any methodology as to how it was calculated it's unverifiable and completely meaningless win-win!
  - a_wild_dandan 1y ago
    I would bet that it's far lower now. Inference is expensive we've made extraordinary efficiency gains through techniques like distillation. That said, GPT-5 is a reasoning model, and those are notorious for high token burn. So who knows, it could be a wash. But selective pressures to optimize for scale/growth/revenue/independence from MSFT/etc makes me think that OpenAI is chasing those watt-hours pretty doggedly. So 0.34 is probably high... ...but then Sora came out.
    - yen223 1y ago
      Yeah, something we are confident about is that a) training is where the bulk of an AI system's energy usage goes (based on a report released by Mistral) b) video generation is very likely a few orders of magnitude more expensive than text generation. That said, I still believe that data centres in general - including AI ones - don't consume a significant amount of energy compared with everything else we do, especially heating and cooling and transport. Pre-LLM data centres consume about 1% of the world's electricity. AI data centres may bump that up to 2%
      - 1y ago

by simonw 1y ago

If I'm interpreting this right it's estimating that ChatGPT's daily energy usage is enough to charge just 14,000 electric vehicles - and that's to serve in the order of ~100 million daily users.

moralestapia 1y ago

I was about to post this exact thing. Seems ... low? And it will only get more efficient going forward. I don't get why this is supposed to be a big deal for infrastructure since there's definitely way more than 14,000 EVs out there and we are doing well.

ares623 1y ago
the infrastructure needs to go somewhere. And that somewhere needs to have access to abundant water and electricity. It just so happens those are things humans need too. Before GenAI we were on our way to optimizing this, at least to the level where the general public can turn a blind eye. It was to the point where the companies would brag about how much efficient they are. Now all that progress is gone, and we're accelerating backwards. Maybe that was all a lie too. But then who's to say the current numbers are a lie too to make the pill easier to swallow.
- moralestapia 1y ago
  Hmm, I guess we'll have to do it the slow way ... What % of EVs on the market is 14,000?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

blibble 1y ago

> We used the figure of 0.34 watt-hours that OpenAI’s Sam Altman stated in a blog post without supporting evidence. what do you think the odds of this being accurate are? zero?

simonw 1y ago
Hard to say. Sam wrote that on June 10th this year: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity GPT-5 came out on 7th August. Assuming the 0.34 value was accurate in the GPT-4o era, is the number today still in the same ballpark or is it wildly different?
- blibble 1y ago
  the "AI" industry have identified that energy usage is going to be used as a stick to beat them with if I was altman then I'd release a few small numbers to try and get influencers talking about "how little energy chatgpt uses" and he can never be accused of lying, as without any methodology as to how it was calculated it's unverifiable and completely meaningless win-win!
- a_wild_dandan 1y ago
  I would bet that it's far lower now. Inference is expensive we've made extraordinary efficiency gains through techniques like distillation. That said, GPT-5 is a reasoning model, and those are notorious for high token burn. So who knows, it could be a wash. But selective pressures to optimize for scale/growth/revenue/independence from MSFT/etc makes me think that OpenAI is chasing those watt-hours pretty doggedly. So 0.34 is probably high... ...but then Sora came out.
  - yen223 1y ago
    Yeah, something we are confident about is that a) training is where the bulk of an AI system's energy usage goes (based on a report released by Mistral) b) video generation is very likely a few orders of magnitude more expensive than text generation. That said, I still believe that data centres in general - including AI ones - don't consume a significant amount of energy compared with everything else we do, especially heating and cooling and transport. Pre-LLM data centres consume about 1% of the world's electricity. AI data centres may bump that up to 2%
    - 1y ago