OpenAI CEO takes really, really long view on energy efficiency

AI is being unfairly targeted over its energy use, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims, as the naysayers ignore the vast amount of resources humans have consumed over millennia – not least to avoid being eating by predators.

Altman, speaking during an interview at the AI Summit in India, said it was reasonable to be concerned about AI's resource consumption: "We need to move toward nuclear or wind and solar very quickly."

But he suggested some concerns were overdone. "Water is totally fake," he said, given that AI datacenters often rely on liquid cooling with closed systems, rather than traditional evaporative cooling.

The interviewer referenced claims by Bill Gates that a single ChatGPT query uses the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone battery charges. Altman rubbished those figures, saying: "There's no way it's anything close to that." He claimed such complaints ignore the total amount of energy it takes to create and train an actual human.

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