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Altman on AI energy: it also takes 20 years of eating food to train a human
- andsoitis 8mo ago[flagged]
- reactordev 8mo agoYou would need empathy for that.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 8mo agoEthics would suffice. Or a basic humanistic education. Unfortunately, that is precisely what these people seem to lack.
- GuestFAUniverse 8mo agoPoison Ivy.
- atomicnumber3 8mo agoIs it possible to become wealthy like this AND value human life? Why does it turn out they every single billionaire is also some combination of narcissist, pedophile, petty tyrant, or just utter freakazoid?
- samename 8mo agoPower corrupts the mind. They live in a different world
- while_true_ 8mo agoTop philanthropists include Jamsetji Tata (donated $102.4 billion), Bill and Melinda Gates ($75.8 billion), Warren Buffett (is pledging to donate 99% of his wealth). Andrew Carnegie gave away 85% of his wealth -- including construction of over 2,500 public libraries.
- grogenaut 8mo agoCarnegie did that to white wash his public opinion while he worked his workers non stop and to mutilation or death. When are you going to the library when you work 996 or more?
- nozzlegear 8mo agoBill Gates is not a great example given the recent revelations surrounding him and the nature of his divorce in the latest batch of the Epstein files.
- atomicnumber3 8mo agoYes. Colors his philanthropy. While I hope Warren Buffet isn't cut from the same cloth, the odds are looking quite bad. It would be nice to know there are some out there who can just be smart, get rich, and then NOT damn your immortal soul. But it's looking grim.
- lokar 8mo agoExperience would point to extreme wealth changing almost everyone who gains it, for the worse.
- WillAdams 8mo agoGates took more than he gave, for example: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
- ossa-ma 8mo ago[flagged]
- saulpw 8mo agoOnly one billionaire has ever given away enough money while he was alive to not be a billionaire. Ever. Pledges don't count. Also Warren Buffet giving away 99% of his wealth still keeps him a billionaire.
- bombcar 8mo agoBecause most people who are not some combination of the above tap out somewhere around the $100m-$500m mark or earlier, because they don't have any reason to get more.
- bitwize 8mo agoThe AI "movement" is hermetic magick. The goal is to bring about God in silico, because if you're not involved in so doing, God may punish you for eternity when he emerges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk Next to the might and terror of the machine God, mere humans are, individually, indeed as nothing...
- ben_w 8mo agoMost of the people working on AI, and even those on the specific sub-domain of AI where Roko's basilisk was coined which isn't the majority of the field by a long shot, have been rolling their eyes at Roko's basilisk since the moment it was coined. Even a brief moment of thought should reveal that, even if you think the scenario likely, there are an infinite number of potential equivalent basilisks and you'd need to pick the correct one. I'm less worried about Roko's basilisk*, and rather more worried about the people who say this: I think you have said in fact, and I'm gonna quote, development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. End quote. You may have had in mind the effect on, on jobs, which is really my biggest nightmare in the long term. - https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-subcommittee-hearing-on-oversight-of-ai/ https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-sub... Because this is clearly not taking the words themselves at face value; either you should dig in and say "so why should we allow it at all then?" or you should dismiss it as "I think you're making stuff up, why should we believe you about anything?", but not misread such a blunt statement. (If you follow the link, Altman's response is… not one I find satisfying). * despite the people who do take it seriously, as such personalities have always been around and seldom cause big issues by themselves; only if AI gets competent enough to help them do this do they become a problem, but by that point hopefully it's also competent enough to help everyone stop them
- salawat 8mo ago>only if AI gets competent enough to help them do this do they become a problem, but by that point hopefully it's also competent enough to help everyone stop them Tell me something; have you ever built something you later regret having built? Like you look back at it, accept you did, but realize that if you'd just been a bit wiser/knowledgeable about the world you wouldn't have done it? In the moment you're doing the thing you'll regret, you don't know in that moment anything better to do until the unpleasant consequences manifest, granting you experience. If you haven't experienced that yet; fine, but we shouldn't be betting on existential problems with "hopefully" if we can at all avoid it. Especially when that hopefully clause involves something we're making the decision to craft, with means and methods we don't fully understand/aren't predictively ahead of, and knowing that the way these methods work have a tendency to generate/provide the basis to generate a thoroughly sycophantic construct.
- ben_w 8mo agoHe may well be as you say, but nothing in this video is evidence of that. To the extent he's a slimy sociopath, he's not openly twirling his metaphorical moustache here, and he's a lot better at hiding villainy than most of the better-known slimy sociopaths in the world today (for comparison, Musk actually tweeted "If this works, I’m treating myself to a volcano lair. It’s time.", this isn't even at that level. He's responding to all the people very upset about how much energy AI takes to train. That said, a quick over-estimate of human "training" cost is 2500 kcal/day * 20 years = 21.21 MWh[0], which is on the low end of the estimates I've seen for even one single 8 billion parameter model. [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2500+kcal%2Fday+*+20+years+in+MWh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2500+kcal%2Fday+*+20+ye...
- dyauspitr 8mo agoWell if you consider the theoretical goal of a machine that has all the answers then you’d understand why he thinks that way.
- eli 8mo agoI’m not sure it’s possible to conclude what hey actually believes from public statements. I do not trust him to tell the truth about anything related to AI.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoTo be fair, it is not just him. There is an entire caste of people across the organizations that see employees as a problem. It is absolutely fascinating to watch, because those people tend to be somewhere in management class and appear to derive a fair amount of happiness from said managing ( and we can argue whether those skills are any good ).
- lokar 8mo agoThis goes beyond just employees. His comparison devalues the basic value of a human life.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- erulabs 8mo agoBig fumble to be unaware how this offhand comment would be taken out of context. He’s clearly saying “lots of important things consume energy” not “let’s replace humans with GPUs” or “humans are wasteful too”. If Altman is to blame for anything, it’s that AI is a scissor-generator extraordinaire.
- xnx 8mo agoGreat to talk about choices in terms of comparison, but this was a really stupid delivery.
- throwyawayyyy 8mo agoI haven't watched the whole interview. In the clip, a couple of things jump out: 1. He was speaking to a receptive audience. The head nods when he starts to make the comparison between the energy for bringing a human up to speed versus that for training an AI. 2. He is trying to rebut a _specific_ argument against his product, that it takes even more energy to do a task than a human does, once its training is priced in. He thinks that this is a fair comparison. The _fact_ that he thinks that this is a fair comparison is why I think it is too generous to say that this is just an offhand comment. Putting an LLM on an equal footing with a human, as if an LLM should have the same rights to the Earth as we do, is anti-human. It also contains a rather glaring logical flaw that I would hope someone as intelligent as Altman should see. The human will be here anyway.
- nozzlegear 8mo ago> 2. He is trying to rebut a _specific_ argument against his product, that it takes even more energy to do a task than a human does, once its training is priced in. He thinks that this is a fair comparison. The _fact_ that he thinks that this is a fair comparison is why I think it is too generous to say that this is just an offhand comment. Putting an LLM on an equal footing with a human, as if an LLM should have the same rights to the Earth as we do, is anti-human. > It also contains a rather glaring logical flaw that I would hope someone as intelligent as Altman should see. The human will be here anyway. Exactly. Perhaps in Altman's world, a human exists specifically to do tasks for him. But in reality, that human was always going to exist and was going to use those 20 years of energy anyway; they only happened to be employed by his rich ass when he wanted them to do a task. It's not equivalent to burning energy on training an LLM to do that task.
- cors-fls 8mo agoThe comparison only starts to make sense in a post-work society where there is no working-class, whose existence depends on working. Unfortunately these companies are working to eliminate jobs, but not in any way making a path for a transition to a post-work society.
- iberator 8mo agoThis! AI is taking jobs faster than making new ones! No field is safe and trying to switch careers over 40 is almost impossible. Even flipping burgers is nearly impossible (very hard to do without pior experience at such age).
- anonzzzies 8mo agoOver 40 at least you are almost halfway. Definitely you can switch, if you are a half decent thinker, most things are possible; I am sure you can become an electrician and that, at least where I live, makes very good money. Plumbers you cannot find if you are keedeep in your own poop here. In my home country my old classmates (I have an electrician degree but became a software engineer) are making more than most programmers being electricians. Not sure what is wrong with someone who cannot flip burgers after 40.
- iberator 8mo agoHave you tried flip burgers after 20 years in IT and zero manual labor? Forced downshift is BRUTAL. Youngsters are 2x faster than you and precise. I'm not from USA tho. I was SHOCKED that I was the worst at flipping the burgers at McDonald's. Pace is CRAZY and stress is NOTHING in comparison to let's say dropping production database or shipping 2 months late in startup. Shit just looks easy, but noise, speed, temp and pressure (constant KPI over your head) is CRAAAAAZY. Got kicked out after 3 months :| Got new job at tech support
- UltraSane 8mo agoThey ARE, just the post-work society is limited to the people who own the AIs
- sxp 8mo agoTo add some math to the discussion: - A human uses between 100W (naked human eating 2000kcal/day) to 10kW (first-world per capita energy consumption). - Frontier models need something like 1-10 MW-years to train. - Inference requires .1-1kW computers. So it takes thousands of human-years to train a single model, but they run at around the same wall clock power consumption as a human. Depending on your personal opinion, they are also .1-1000x as a productive as the median human in how much useful work (or slop) they can produce per unit time.
- cheeseblubber 8mo agoThe human brain also is a product of billions of years of evolution. We branched off from our common ancestor 7-9 million years ago. We encode quite a lot of structure and information that is essential for intelligence. The starting point of just our life time of training is incomplete. If you calculate 100W * 7 million years * 365 = 255,500MW to train.
- arcticbull 8mo agoIf you really want to go down that path then AI's are the product of human ingenuity and labor so you have to amortize all of that into AI training. Then numbers become pretty meaningless very quickly. That sand didn't up and start thinking on its own you know.
- grogenaut 8mo agoThat's the NRE of getting to where we are and having these llms
- ncr100 8mo agoThe math is simpler, 1 human is irreplaceable by AI. Therefore its value is infinite. Therefore Altman's hypothesis is toilet paper thin.
- thenthenthen 8mo agoI remember when toilet paper was like ddr5
- add-sub-mul-div 8mo agoReal "This must hit so hard if you're stupid" moment.
- drcongo 8mo agoHe really is a total piece of shit isn't he.
- dk1138 8mo agoHe has proved it over and over and over again.
- kylehotchkiss 8mo agoWhat a depressing view of life. I don't expect him to take on some religious or philosophical view, but come on, how could you grow up somewhere wonderful, start a successful company with a lot of people you probably like and enjoy working with, have enough money to buy an island and still summarize life like that. I prefer Richard Brandson's worldview. He's rich, but seeing the way he talks about his late wife and her memory warms my heart. I envy him for the human parts of his life, not just the success.
- dk1138 8mo agoPower just unequivocally screws up most people. This past year has really crystallized how few good leaders there are.
- heliumtera 8mo agoWho cares about humans, it's 2026. We only care about pelicans riding bicycles
- ncr100 8mo agoPost human thinking by the CEO is not helping me feel comfortable with the Vision setting going on for Open AI. Edit: Or perhaps more correctly, "less valuable human". Which is more appropriate?
- thenthenthen 8mo agoGood question. It sounds like post-humanism, which, even in like left art circles was considered ‘interesting’ ten years ago (like post-antroposcene). These are not very useful terms so appreciate the nuance of ‘less valuable human’. It is not so catchy though, maybe we need to dig deeper. I am sure this has been discussed before.
- lich_king 8mo agoI see some folks here defending Altman because it was an off-the-cuff remark in front of a receptive audience. But why does this make the comment acceptable? Would you give me if I talked about eating babies, but defended myself by saying that I was speaking to a receptive audience? Most charitably, it's a dumb thing to say. It compares two unrelated things if you see the value of human life to be more than just answering prompts. Less charitably, the argument is evil: if he was trying to make a sincere apples-to-apples comparison, it implies that he doesn't value human life beyond the labor his company can automate. I can understand edgy teenagers making arguments like that on LessWrong forums, but Altman ought to know better. He either doesn't, or he sincerely believes what the comment implies.
- rspoerri 8mo agoHow many people is he willing to let starve for the sake of his ego power and wealth?
- morkalork 8mo agoIt's, okay, we can just eat cake instead!
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jmfldn 8mo agoThis is a profound category error. What Altman reduces to a 20-year 'training' cycle fueled by 'energy' is what we, in the actual world, call life. It is a stunningly hollow perspective that uses the language of industrial output to describe the human experience. While he is likely being provocative to keep his product at the center of the cultural conversation, it probably exposes something about him.
- csallen 8mo agoThis is a super disingenuous take. He was very obviously making a specific point, not try express a perspective on the value of humanity.
- polotics 8mo agoThe meaning of a message is what has been understood.
- dang 8mo agoCan you please make your substantive points without being snarky or condescending? Your comment would be fine without that last bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- csallen 8mo agoThe meaning of a message is what is intended + communicated, assuming those intentions were communicated clearly. Willfully interpreting otherwise (especially uncharitably so) is the very definition of being disingenuous, which is pretending to not know what was really meant.
- polotics 8mo agoI disagree: if a message is open to such disingenuous interpretations, then its meaning has not been formulated clearly enough. I use the: (1) say what you will communicate, (2) communicate, (3) say what you have communicated rule, also the six W's...
- Fricken 8mo agoOne could feed several hundred thousand kids to adulthood with for the cost of training OpenAIs biggest models.
- accounting2026 8mo agoI didn't read/hear it as reducing human life to 'training energy', but I don't like the comparison at the technical level. Firstly, the math isn't even close. A human being consumes maybe 15 MWh of food energy from years 0 to 20. Modern frontier models take on the order of 100,000 MWh to train. It's a 10,000x difference. Furthermore, the human is actively doing 'inference' (living, acting, producing) during those 20 years of training and is also doings lots of non-brain stuff. Besides the energy math, it's comparing apples-to-oranges. A human brain doesn't start out as a blank slate; it has billions of years of evolutionary priors for language and spatial reasoning that LLMs have to teach themselves from scratch, so this could explain why a human can do some things cheaper. Also, the learning material available to a human is inherently created to be easily ingested by a human brain, whereas a blank LLM needs to build the capacity to process that data. Altman seems to hint at a comparison to the whole human evolution, but that seems unfair in the other direction, because humans and human evolution had to make discoveries from scratch and trial and error whereas LLMs get to ingest the final "good stuff". But either way you slice it, it's just not a good comparison, though not an 'inhuman' or immoral one.
- WithinReason 8mo agoA US resident consumes 76 MWh per year [0], so 1.52 GWh over 20 years. A single model can be trained once and used by millions. Therefore LLMs are ~10000x more energy efficient than humans. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption#per-capita-where-do-people-consume-the-most-energy https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption#per...
- accounting2026 8mo agoYour numbers are about how much is used also for transport etc. Sam's number were about what the human body itself uses for training, hence why I used the caloric consumption.
- sc68cal 8mo agoI think this reveals a great deal about the thinking of the ruling elites. The K shaped recovery phenomenon demonstrated that the economy can continue to thrive, when consumption by the lowest earners is replaced and concentrated by earners at the top. This demonstrated to the elites that actually, we don't need as many consumers to grow the economy, and that it's possible to redistribute wealth upward without losing growth. These public comments just show that the elites are more and more comfortable making it explicit that there are too many "useless eaters" in their opinion, and that the change has been from considering just the Third World to be where these "useless eaters" are while still preserving an imperial core, to now considering everyone that isn't them, regardless of First or Third world, to be a useless eater. Very dangerous thinking, but at least it's out in the open now. They want to capture the entire value of everyone's labor and hoard it for themselves, and discard the people that produced it.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jethronethro 8mo agoJust more word salad from Altman.
- juancn 8mo agoAn AI model takes about 100 to 150 MW to be trained. A human at rest used ~100Wh, up to 400Wh for an elite athlete under effort. So 20 years at 200Wh (I'm being generous here) ends up being 35MW, still cheaper, and inference is still at under 200Wh!
- xnx 8mo agoHow much energy does it take to feed, clothe, house, entertain, and transport that human to 18? Probably $500K worth.
- politelemon 8mo agoHow much does it take to build data centers to house the inferencing, and an the involved logistics, infrastructure setup, bribery, marketing, and organisational structure behind it. Easily in the hundred billions.
- robotpepi 8mo ago> Probably $500K worth. What life standards do you have!?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- _DeadFred_ 8mo agoThe reductionism and comparison of a human life to a corporate product is disgusting but it's valuable to see how they truly see the world they are creating. Their idea of a person's value seems to be less than the communist soviets at this point, nothing but work units.
- juancn 8mo agoIt was meant tongue in cheek, if we're doing wild comparisons, I might as well do one.
- mhher 8mo agoTo me the whole OpenClaw situation is proof enough how desperate OpenAI must be for fresh (real, non-circular) cash. In that light Altman saying things things like that is not really surprising. Contrary it only reinforces their desperation to me.
- HeavyStorm 8mo agoSo he's comparing a human being to AI, finally showing what our AI overlords think of humanity: we're just wasteful resources to be replaced by more efficiency tools.
- DemocracyFTW2 8mo ago"Why don't they eat cake?"
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- lysace 8mo agoAltman is not a speciesist, I guess. Context: Elon Musk is perhaps the world’s most famous doom-monger and has repeatedly sounded the alarm about the possibility of super-smart machines wiping out humanity. But Google founder Larry Page allegedly dismissed these fears as ‘speciesist’ during an argument at a Napa Valley party in 2015. A top professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has claimed the two tech moguls clashed in a ‘long and spirited debate’ in the early hours of the morning. In his book Life 3.0: Being Human In The Age of Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark wrote: ‘[Page’s] main concerns were that AI paranoia would delay the digital utopia and/or cause a military takeover of AI that would fall foul of Google’s “don’t be evil” slogan. ‘Elon kept pushing back and asked Larry to clarify details of his arguments, such as why he was so confident that digital life wouldn’t destroy everything we care about. ‘At times, Larry accused Elon of being “speciesist”: treating certain life forms as inferior just because they were silicon-based rather than carbon-based.’ (https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/02/elon-musks-fears-artificial-intelligence-will-destroy-humanity-speciesist-according-google-founder-larry-page-7515207/ https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/02/elon-musks-fears-artificial-i...)
- palata 8mo agoThe problem I see is that in our society, CEOs are chosen for their ability to convince that they can increase productivity. Not for their ability to improve the life of people. Just like the paperclip AI issue, CEOs are optimising for arbitrary metrics, and they are really good at that (because we select them precisely for that). So obviously, as soon as you start wondering about how competent a CEO is at talking about life, you're in for a treat. He obviously has no idea about life. He is just a successful paperclip production machine. What scares me is that we select those people for their ability to convince that they will generate money, in the hope that they will actually do that, and then we value their opinion about completely unrelated topics. You may as well ask a curling professional athlete what they think about the problem of AI and energy. Not that they necessarily will say something as dumb as Altman of course, but you wouldn't behave as if they were experts in the field of... you know... the impact of energy on humanity and life in general.
- tsoukase 8mo agoCEOs are a mix of scary, funny, innovative and naive persons. It's the first time an LLM is compared with a human in terms of energy. I will not comment the foolishness and superficiality of the quote. I would add that a human can meet another human and they make another human.
- emregucerr 8mo agoPeople dismiss this as a meme too quick but I think this is a good thought experiment not only for drawing a comparison for energy consumption but learning efficiency. AI is often criticized for its low learning efficiency but if you compare it to a human it's not looking too bad. Let's say a human becomes an AGI-level learner by the time they are 14yo. Human vision is approx. 500 megapixels and that is approx. 1.7 Gb per second of vision data. That means it takes approx. 800 PETABYTES of data to 'pre-train' a human to become a well-enough generalist learner. Take Llama 4 from Meta whose training data set consisted of 30 trillion tokens - his is equivalent of 120 Tb which is a mere 0.12 peta-bytes. I am well aware this is a flimsy napkin math at best but I find comparing LLM models to humans with a more serious tone is fun and useful thought.
- lccerina 8mo agoSam Altman (and everyone else in the field) complain that estimates of water and power consumption of AI are wrong, but instead of just publishing that data they come up with this crap.
- stratos123 8mo agoWhat data do you want to see published about water consumption? Here's Google's tiny tiny estimates[1], for example. AFAIK AI water usage has always been a made-up issue, spread by people who never realized before how much water is routinely spent by humanity. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measuring-the-environmental-impact-of-ai-inference https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur...
- lccerina 7mo agoFrom the post you linked "These findings do not represent the specific environmental impact for all Gemini App text-generation prompts nor are they indicative of future performance." I would like to see independent agencies having access to the various companies to provide reliable estimates. Just because humanity as a whole consumes a lot of water does not justify the extra consumption of water AND energy AND land AND monetary resources that is wasted on AI crap.