Sam Altman would like to remind you that humans use a lot of energy, too

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said concerns about artificial intelligence water usage are totally fake while speaking at an event hosted by The Indian Express. He was in India for a major artificial intelligence summit. Altman noted that such issues were real when evaporative cooling was used in data centers but that claims of 17 gallons of water per query now have no connection to reality. Altman acknowledged that it is fair to worry about overall energy consumption because the world is using so much artificial intelligence. He said the world needs to move toward nuclear or wind and solar energy very quickly. No legal requirement exists for technology companies to disclose energy and water use, leaving scientists to study the matter independently, and data centers have been linked to rising electricity prices. Altman rejected the claim that a single ChatGPT query uses the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone battery charges. He said many discussions about energy usage are unfair when they compare the energy to train an artificial intelligence model to the energy for one human inference query. Altman argued that training a human also takes substantial energy, including 20 years of life and food consumption plus the evolution of 100 billion people.