OpenAI’s Sam Altman slammed over ‘dystopian’ comments on ChatGPT’s energy consumption

Artificial intelligence’s use of water has long been a topic of discussion online, but OpenAI’s Sam Altman – the parent company of chatbot ChatGPT – found himself in hot water in the face of comments made about the energy consumption of technology.

In an interview with The Indian ExpressAt Anant Goenka’s Anant Goenka at the Express Adda event this week, Altman threw cold water on the claim that…well…cold water is used in AI data centers to keep computers from overheating.

Sorry, we couldn’t resist.

He said: “Water is totally wrong. It was true, we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers, but now that we don’t do it anymore, you see these things on the internet where [it’s] “don’t use ChatGPT, that’s 17 gallons of water for each query, or whatever”.

“It’s completely false, it’s totally insane, no connection with reality.

“What is fair, though, is the energy consumption – not per query, but in total – because the world is using AI so much that it’s real and we need to move very quickly to nuclear or wind and solar.”

Goenka then turned to energy consumption and referenced a theory by Microsoft founder Bill Gates that “AIs will learn from human evolution to be more efficient in the amount of energy they consume.”

In response to this, Altman said: “One of the things that is always unfair about this comparison is that people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model, versus what it costs for a human to perform an inference query.

“But it also takes a lot of energy to form a human being. It takes about 20 years of life, and all the food you eat before that point, before you become intelligent. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people who have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned to understand science and everything that produced you, and then you took everything you took.

“The fair comparison is if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once a model is trained to answer that question, compared to a human, and probably the AI ​​has already caught up based on energy efficiency, measured that way.”

But Altman’s response didn’t go down well on X/Twitter, with one writing that “these people are deeply antisocial and antihuman”:

Simon Gallagher, editor-in-chief of Comicbook.com, argued: “Anyone who talks like this about humans should not be allowed work that impacts other humans in any way”:

“They see no difference between humans and objects,” commented cartoonist George Alexopoulos:

Pastor L. David Fairchild called these remarks “dystopian”:

“He says a really big spreadsheet and a baby are morally equivalent,” researcher Matt Stoller tweeted:

Altman’s comments also received the meme treatment:

One argued that “1 second of a human life is worth more than all AI combined.”

And another made the scathing comment that they “don’t know how much energy was used to train Altman, but it was clearly a huge waste”:

OpenAI was approached by indy100 for comment.

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