Sam Altman considers criticism of AI’s energy consumption unfair: He explains that people need a lot of energy to become intelligent.
AI data centers require huge amounts of energy to handle the many requests from users. And this high consumption is often criticized by many people.
In an interview with The Indian Express, which you can watch on YouTube, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, responded to the criticism that AI consumes so much energy. He believes this criticism is unfair. Because people have also consumed a lot of energy over a long period.
Altman: People consume energy for over 20 years before they are wise
This is what Altman said: The head of OpenAI explained that people would consume energy over 20 years before they are smart enough (via Tomshardware.com):
One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is that people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model compared to how much it costs a human to perform an inference query.
(…)
People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years and all the food you consume during that time before you become wise.
Nevertheless, the strong energy consumption remains under criticism. For example, Satya Nadella, the head of Microsoft, stated that energy must not be wasted on useless things. Because then, public support for AI would be lost.
A user wondered on X (formerly Twitter) how much money OpenAI has already lost on electricity costs because people say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to ChatGPT. This question was personally answered by tech billionaire and CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman: Head of ChatGPT says users are wasting a fortune by saying please and thank you to the AI
