« A chatgpt query consumes approximately 0.34 watt-hour, what would be used in a second, or what a low consumption bulb would consume in two minutes “Writes Sam Altman on his blog. On the water side, he evokes ” about a fifteenth teaspoon ». These figures are far from alarming … until they are multiplied.
A minimal request, but massive uses
With some 400 million weekly users – a constantly increasing figure – the environmental impact of Chatgpt is added very quickly. Not to mention the other AI models, such as Gemini by Google or Claude d’Anthropic, also massively used. In this context, the low individual imprint of a request becomes a subject of society.
The concern rises as AI becomes omnipresent in our lives. A chatgpt breakdown recently, for more than ten hours, left millions of Internet users without their usual virtual assistant … An incident revealing the level of dependence reached. If Sam Altman seeks to reassure, showing that the consumption of Chatgpt remains moderate, the debate is obviously far from closed.
In the same post, Sam Altman draws up an optimistic panorama of the future. According to him, we have crossed a technical course. AI accelerates scientific research, releases productivity and already allows certain researchers ” to do in a year what took them a decade before ». The coming years promise spectacular advances, especially in the development of robots capable of producing other robots, or systems capable of generating their own improvements … always according to the boss of Openai.
The objective, according to the leader, is that the cost of intelligence converges to that of electricity. But this dynamic has a Price: feeding the data centers, driving models, maintaining the infrastructure. And according to certain estimates, AI could ultimately consume more electricity than the mining of cryptocurrencies. The question of energy optimization then becomes central, both for businesses and for governments.
Sam Altman also claims to want to avoid the excessive concentration of the power that artificial intelligence gives. It pleads for wide accessibility, shared governance, and so that society as a whole participates in the definition of the limits of these technologies.
These ambitions will certainly have to be accompanied by concrete measures to limit the ecological imprint of the AI. Because if Chatgpt one day becomes the energy equivalent of a light that remains on everywhere, all the time, it will be necessary to wonder who will pay the bill.
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