Sam Altman has made a new statement that we are sure will also get him criticized. In a Q&A with the Times of India, the OpenAI CEO called concerns about water consumption by artificial intelligence (AI) “fake, crazy and not based on reality”. He added that this issue is only relevant when data centers still use evaporative cooling systems, which have been discontinued.
But more controversially, Altman said that ChatGPT queries use the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone batteries, which is absurd when it is more fair to say that the energy used to answer a question is the energy used to train a model.
He said that humans are also “trained” for 20 years with high energy consumption in the form of food before they become intelligent. Therefore, AI may already be on par or more efficient than humans in terms of energy consumption to answer a question.
This answer he gave will certainly be another bullet that will be used to shoot the need for AI systems that result in high energy and water consumption. Data center demand has also caused device prices to rise this year and is expected to cause several companies to go bankrupt due to failure to secure the necessary supply of memory components.
