OpenAI’s Sam Altman slammed over ‘dystopian’ comments on ChatGPT’s energy consumption | indy100

The Indian Express/YouTube

The use of water by artificial intelligence has long been an online talking point, but Sam Altman of OpenAI – the parent company of the chatbot ChatGPT – has found himself in hot water over comments made about the technology’s energy consumption.

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

Sorry, we couldn’t resist.

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

“This is completely untrue, it’s totally insane, no connection to reality.

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

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

Responding to this, Altman said: “One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query.

“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life, and all the food you eat before that time, before you get smart. And not only that, it took like the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever to produce you, and then you took whatever 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, versus a human, and probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”

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

Comicbook.com executive editor Simon Gallagher argued: “Anybody who talks like this about humans should not be allowed a job that in any way impacts other humans”:

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

Pastor L. David Fairchild labelled the remarks “dystopian”:

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

Altman’s comments also received the meme treatment:

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

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

OpenAI has been approached by indy100 for comment.

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