Sam Altman Would Like To Remind You That Humans Use a Lot of Energy, Too (techcrunch.com) 142
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI's environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water consumption as "totally fake" and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI's energy use is to compare it against humans.
In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality."
On energy, he conceded it is "fair" to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI, and called for a rapid shift toward nuclear, wind and solar power. He took particular issue with comparisons that pit the cost of training a model against a single human inference, noting it "takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat" before a person gets smart -- and that on a per-query basis, AI has "probably already caught up on an energy efficiency basis."
In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality."
On energy, he conceded it is "fair" to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI, and called for a rapid shift toward nuclear, wind and solar power. He took particular issue with comparisons that pit the cost of training a model against a single human inference, noting it "takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat" before a person gets smart -- and that on a per-query basis, AI has "probably already caught up on an energy efficiency basis."
Fuck you, Sam (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck Sam Altman and his ravenous need to destroy the planet for bragging rights.
Honestly, I feel like there should be a disorder named after Sam Altman to highlight his sociopathy and utter disdain for anyone who doesn't "share his vision".
Re:Fuck you, Sam (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fuck you, Sam (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and in a fight to the death with Elon Musk he's the one you root for. That and hopefully succumbing afterward to his injuries.
Looking to Sam Altman as a leader is literally what capitalism is. Capitalism is engaging in sociopathy assuming you won't be the victim; late stage unregulated capitalism is what we are seeing, Sam Altman is just a sad face of it.
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I think that's an open question. We can look at history and see how capitalism has evolved over the years. Historians can argue about whether it was inevitable for it to evolve the way it did. I'm sure there are good arguments on both sides. But ultimately it's an academic question. Capitalism did evolve in a particular way, and it's very different today from what it was 50 years ago.
Re:Fuck you, Sam (Score:4, Insightful)
True. It's harnessed by effective taxation, sophisticated financial and insurance systems with effective safeguards, strong social programs treasured by citizens and widely shared prosperity that lets pretty much anybody own and utilize effective capital if they desire. Even traditionally disadvantaged parts of the world are vaulting ahead with their own social and economic innovations and enjoying unprecedented prosperity.
And then there's the United States.
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He's not alone, though, and while not all in his bandwagon are as arrogantly unpleasant as he is, all of them are equally harmful.
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Alternative article title:
Sam Altman Would Like To Remind You That He Is A Sociopath And You Are In The Way Of His Billions.
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"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"
In this instance there seems to be room enough for both, and at scale.
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He isn't using his models, we are.
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Any idea how much resources/effort go into creating the next edition of ChatGPT ? You would be amazed how many "hello" prompts it would take to match that amount of energy/effort. The "Hello" prompt being one of the most useless, yet very demanding for it's size.
"But the AI can be repaired" said Nomad (Score:2)
Okay FP, but I think you could have added some element of humor. No jokes yet on the story and the only candidate that came to my non-humorous mind is some kind of "efficiency" joke, leading back to Nomad and its dangerous "repair" operations on the Enterprise and crew members. There was also a TOS episode about a malignant AI taking over the Enterprise, but I can't think of any jokes out of that episode, though obviously Sam Altman could be substituted for the mad scientist...
And I still suspect there are
Re: Fuck you, Sam (Score:2)
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What's your point?
This is generally true (Score:5, Insightful)
Even humans' brains use a lot of energy... except for Sam Altman's.
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A standard Big Mac is ~570 kcal, or 2.4 x 10^6 J, about 95% of which can be extracted by the human digestive system. An H100 uses about 350 to 700 W max, with typical working draw on the lower end. Say 500 W, being generous.
A Big Mac would power that H100 for an hour and a quarter or so, which is a lot of queries. You could get a typical diffusion model to make a few thousand pictures in that amount of time while a typical artist might have difficulty finishing one on a single hamburger.
For many things AI i
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Yes, the brain is doing a lot more than the specific task. It's probably true that the brain is more efficient on a per operation basis. It's generally less efficient on a per task basis. The cynic would point out that the off-task stuff your brain is doing is a detriment to your employer, not a benefit.
You, like most people, including Sam Altman, are stuck on LLMs. ANNs can do a lot of things and they tend to be vastly more efficient than humans and quite a lot more efficient than conventional algorithms.
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If you want to have impact (no demand, just a statement) go vegan. The meat is the worst energy/water problem of the Big Mac.
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Yes, and the human is probably doing the work at a computer anyway, using a significant fraction of the electrical power it would be using if it were running a model. Probably more electricity overall because the human takes much longer to complete the task.
The point is that Sam Altman is not wrong... on this specific point. AI in general is quite efficient. Paradigm shifting efficient in lots of cases. The wild energy needs Altman keeps talking about are because he wants to be the first to make AGI and he
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I won't agree with Sam Altman on many points, the problem is that some of the AI opposition has even worse argumentation style. I'd wish people would stick to the facts, look up some numbers and put them into relation (e.g. with other daily use, or at least computer a per-user ratio), then we could have a reasonable discussion about things instead of one side talking like AI would dry the oceans and the other side talking about humans also using energy.
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Unfortunately that would require people (including Sam Altman) to actually learn things. Facts are inconvenient and numbers are scary.
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Yes. Efficiency depends on both what the numerator and denominator are. Your boss doesn't care about your other outputs. You do.
Re:This is generally true (Score:5, Interesting)
Human brains use very little energy, though. 20 years of food do not go to training a brain but growing the entire organism AND doing a great deal of work.
And this isn't coming from Sam Altman's brain, it's just the latest gaslighting from the AI industry. I would expect greed on the scale of Altman's to require as much energy as any other brain consumes. Sometimes energy isn't directed towards noble ends.
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Out side of some specific objective context comparing human energy use to AI is kinda silly. At the societal conversation level, Sam is ignoring the 'humans' are ultimately the reason we are doing any of this.
They will be there anyway. We have an economy so that the collective 'we' have things we need like food, a warm place to sleep, and things we want entertainment, presweetened breakfast cereal, fast cars, etc.
Tools increase productivity which means humans can do less work and live better but you can't
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Sam is ignoring the 'humans' are ultimately the reason we are doing any of this.
It seems to me that you're ignoring the fact that Slopman isn't "ignoring the humans", he just wants to dispose of most of them.
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and even harmful to society at large most of the time.
So what you're saying is that I'm powerful? Thanks, coward troll! Society at large is a shitfest so I'm now swelling with pride.
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You forget that God - is justice - his Word and deed is infallible.
I agree with everyone else- take your meds. Maybe increase the dosage. And tell your therapist about this too.
Besides, how could Jesus be the Messiah when he never fulfilled even ONE of the Messianic prophecies?
In short, Jesus was a liar and a fraud.
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Jesus did not claim to be any Messhias.
just a very naughty boy?
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As usual, you have NO fucking idea what you're babbling about. You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. What the fuck is wrong with you??
According to the New Testament, Jesus explicitly and implicitly claimed to be the Messiah (the Christ). Key instances include his direct affirmation to the high priest ("I am"), telling the Samaritan woman he was the promised one, and stating that Isaiah's prophecy was fulfilled in him
Direct Affirmation: At his trial, when asked, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blesse
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It's so easy to see why everyone here despises you. Like I said, you have NO fucking idea what you're babbling about. It's in every bible ever published.
Stop pretending you know shit. You don't.
Have someone read this to you very, very slowly:
Jesus explicitly and implicitly claimed to be the Messiah (the Christ). At his trial, when asked, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?", Jesus answered, "I am".
But Jesus was lying, as he often did. He might have even believed he was the Messiah, but that d
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Jesus did not claim to be any Messhias.
And the only place he even directly claims to be the son of God is in Saul's retcons, which were written decades after alleged Jesus' alleged death.
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You forget that God - is justice - his Word and deed is infallible.
Man created god in his own image, and only the most easily led of sheep fail to comprehend why and what for.
overpopulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, we all know that half of global problems (climate change, pollution, too much energy usage, etc.) would disappear if half of the human population would vanish. But without Thanos, it's not like half of us would volunteer, right?
So, we don't have control over how many people there are. We DO have control over how much electricity we feed into AI systems.
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"A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"
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And the women there have three tits!
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It's a quote from the 1982 movie Blade Runner, actually.
This (Score:4, Insightful)
Sacking all the workers and replacing them with Altmans masturbary fantasy AI bots isn't going to make those people go away - they'll still be consuming the same amount of water and food so his whole argument is specious beyond belief.
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He has a great point. Instead of cutting back on AI, we can start killing humans. They're completely interchangeable, after all. With more AI we won't "need" as many humans, so let's just eliminate them. Think of all the resources we'll free up to build more data centers!
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Think about it!
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Not to mention that they own most of the land, which would free up that land for development such as building more AI data centers.
Win-win all around !
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No need to disappear or need Thanos. Just have fewer progeny.
It's easy, cheaper, you will have more money and time, and the planet benefits.
You do have control over how many more people YOU make.
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Yes, me personally. But not population globally. And any attempt to make laws regarding that (outside China) is considered a violation of the most basic human right.
It's not one of those "you can start with yourself" things. On the contrary, in most developed countries population is already shrinking. Which weirdly makes our politicians think they need to import people from countries that still breed like rabbits.
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I don't think there is a need to make laws. It's the natural human instinct after a certain degree if intellectual maturity to have fewer progeny because they see how complex life now is.
China was criticized to breed like rabbits once too, but look at them now. With development comes lower fertility. That also applies to developed parts of India and middle east.
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It's the natural human instinct after a certain degree if intellectual maturity to have fewer progeny because they see how complex life now is.
Yeah... no. No, that's not the reason. But yes, with higher standards of living and education and the absence of religion comes lower birth rates.
All of which is currently being rolled back.
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There's plenty of food, water, shelter & medicine for everyone
Unless the slow destruction of the Earth's ecosystem worries you a bit. Because all of this stuff uses up resources. And while there is tons and tons of water on Earth, actual drinking water is already scarce in many parts of the world.
So– (Score:2)
Use people to power AI datacenters?
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Don't give them ideas. This is how you get The Matrix.
Lmafo (Score:5, Insightful)
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- It takes years of investment before that one human brain can function at that level.
- There's also a decline at the end where it's not delivering what it used too.
- There are also all the additional creature comforts that we need to function (lighting, air condition, etc, etc.)
With that said... AI's are still no where near the same value proposition as the human brain (I actively use them an
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One human brain takes roughly 15 watts of power
Indeed. One of the key areas in which AI research has lots of opportunity to advance is in efficiency. In theory, silicon-based intelligence should be both faster and more energy-efficient than neuronal intelligence because our neurons are actually quite slow and not terribly efficient. But the human brain's architecture obviously makes vastly more effective use of the processing power it has, so there's enormous opportunity for improvement in our current silicon analogs.
It will crack me up if after a
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It's not like they'll say "Let's sell the old hardware our models are now small enough to run on a watch" but they will scale them to the hardware so they again have something not everyone can run on their smartwatch.
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What do you mean by making it redundant? Should we get such a breakthrough, they will use the data centers to do their "super intelligence" and maybe reach it (I mean what *will* happen if you have a 1000x brain? Nobody knows yet).
That's fair.
Well, he _does_ have a point. (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at bizarre shit-show that is morning and evening commute here in Germany and the insane waste caused by the infrastructure required to keep office workers "working" and those countless bullshit-jobs afloat, I have to say he has a point. How heavy that one weighs or how valid it finally is I can't say just now, but he does have a point.
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No he doesn't, not in the slightest. And what point do you think your experience with commutes says he does?
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He doesn't have a point, though. He doesn't want to eliminate make-work. He wants to profit from having it done by computers instead of humans. The logical conclusion of which is crashing world economies by creating unprecedented numbers of unemployed people at an unprecedented rate. Would the numbers be bigger only because we have more people? No, they would also be bigger because we also have an unprecedented percentage of people doing jobs that don't actually matter, or that in fact make things worse for
So it's humans or AI (Score:2)
Honestly, I'd trade Sam Altman for some AI power. Not so much the rest of humanity (some exceptions apply).
Like Zuck/Ellison/Musk, only more polite (Score:3)
Sam Altman lives in his own hallucination, spouting bullshit.
What he reaily meant was (Score:5, Insightful)
I want you tot let me build my datacenters so I can displace the salary you get and the energy you use and bring it under my control. That's what he really wants. But I'm doubtful of his claim that AI can do tasks with less energy. A human runs about 2.3kwh a day, and ~800W at work. Running claude code to do 1.3kwh during a typical coding day. So what is more efficient? Another thing to consider is neurons use about a million times less energy to function and do a heck of a lot more than a transistor. Sillicon is not going to compete with wet ware on energy costs.
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Claude code will write a lot more code than a human in a day.
Silicon is already more efficient than wetware for a very large number of tasks.
Our brains aren't meant for the kind of work we do.
What do you think is more efficient to multiply 2 large numbers, you are a tiny calculator?
Training a model has about the lifetime carbon output of 4 average people in US. That's training, not inferencing.
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Yeah, AI can do stuff faster, more energy efficient, probably not. Keep in mind they don't have any human brain models yet, and those would require much more energy than an LLM.
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Why do you need human brain models? They are replacing for tasks for now, not your whole life.
They are more energy efficient than humans for many tasks. A small 30B, and sometimes an 8B model, can code faster and better than an average coder. That does not take a lot of energy.
Eventually though, we expect full human level models to be more energy efficient than humans. That's not too many years away.
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We are reaching peak LLM usefulness fast. Humans can ingest data from multiple senses, once you start doing that you increase the training cost. We aren't talking about replacing just coders, we are talking about replacing humans, which is going to take models that can ingest more than text and even more than just pictures. Video alone takes a lot of power, and every time you even change video formats it takes 1-2 watts. Generating a 5 second video takes about 1kWh of energy, which is about equal to a 1/2 d
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Why would a data center be the size of a Rubik's cube? That is an illogical requirement. We just don't call small computers data centers regardless of how powerful and capable they are.
Data centers serve models for not a single user, but for a large user base.
You can run models that previously took a data center, on a small computer the size of a Rubik's Cube.
This runs on a desktop with a good video card.
https://huggingface.co/bartows... [huggingface.co]
https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qw... [huggingface.co]
It exceeds the performance of models t
Biased Bullshit. (Score:3)
The Rest of Us have been forced to buy shitty squiggly light bulbs and get fined for not maintaining a mandatory grass lawn under maximum water restrictions. We have to buy our own solar panels just to TRY and keep up with the cost of Greed shilling "free" services while raping our electric infrastructure.
Turn off ALL AI and shitcoin processing in the United States for one fiscal quarter. THEN have Sam Altman tell us how much we humans cost compared to the arrogance driving Greed N. Corruption. Fucking electric bill would probably be cut in half if we weren't driving that stupid shit.
Sam's middle finger to humanity (Score:2)
Sam says AI is good, Sam says AI competes with humans in terms of resources, I'm deducting that Sam clearly prefers the existence of AI queries over humans, in the context of a world with finite resources. What a great example of a human being you are, Sam.
The math is secondary to the message. (Score:2)
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Notice that the only value he sees in Humanity is as "useful and compliant factory workers", for times-adjusted values of 'factory'.
He likely considers a family reunion picnic to be a waste of resources.
"ChatGPT never needs to put its daughter into piano lessons - think of the savings!!!" - probably.
How Much Does the World Rely on AI? (Score:4, Interesting)
On energy, he conceded it is "fair" to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI
Just how heavily does the world rely on AI? A lot? Some? Not as much as Sam believes? Enough to cover the cost of building and running these data centers? Anybody have any real figures and citations?
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Particularly interesting is how the assumption is that for this round of tech, the successful LLM companies will succeed in avoiding any on-premise competition and thus the datacenters are obviously a long-term requirement.
All that just to say (Score:2)
Yeah, sooooo heavily. /s
So, what's the point of AI, then? (Score:4, Insightful)
Many of these techbros miss that the point of the economy is to provide a context for human livelihood. We could build a perfectly decent Earth without any AIs at all, if we decided to. For humans, there is no point to Earth without humans.
I could understand making an argument for some sort of evolutionary thing, though I wouldn't agree with it. But right now, today, that is also a dumbass argument. In a human-scale apocalypse (high-death-rate plague, nuclear winter, asteroid, etc), AIs will be among the first things to be discarded. Regardless of the current status of AIs or where they'll be in the next few years, we are a minimum of decades aware from AIs being self-hosted, even if you just give up all semblance of stewardship of the the ability of earth to host biological entities.
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Many of these techbros miss that the point of the economy is to provide a context for human livelihood. We could build a perfectly decent Earth without any AIs at all, if we decided to. For humans, there is no point to Earth without humans.
Yeah, by comparing human energy consumption with AI energy consumption, this one seems to be arguing that their tech will replace human labor, and therefore, we won't need to feed the humans anymore.
You can't compare the energy spent training a model to the energy spent training a person, because unless you stop letting people procreate, you're not going to stop training the people. That's a committed cost. Future AI model training isn't.
50GJ (Score:3)
If you put, say, 50GJ into a human over 20 years you get an adult human being.
If you put the same energy into AI you get an offensive bogus video ad for a political campaign.
Just kill all humans then... (Score:2)
So when someone tells his agentic AI "solve energy crisis" - it will just kill all humans based on Altman's hints?
Get rid of all humans then (Score:2)
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I'd rather get rid of all billionaires - assuming this is an "either or" situation.
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It really shows how they think of you (Score:2)
You are absolutely not human to a billionaire. You're livestock.
let's compare (Score:3)
A human brain uses about 20 watts of power. Google is your friend if you don't trust me.
An AI datacenter uses more than 500 watts per GPU. How many GPUs went into a query? I don't know but even one used more power than a brain, and to do less.
My brain not only handles language, but also vision, and motor skills, all at the same time.
An LLM can only generate a lot of words.
Get real Sam, no one believes your bullshit.
That logic ends badly (Score:2)
If the premise is "resource use is the problem" and “humans use the most resources," then the implied fix isn’t optimizing AI... it’s reducing humans.
That "people-as-the-problem" frame has been operationalized before (not saying this is the same thing, just naming the logic): Nazi Germany, Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, the Khmer Rouge. Different ideologies, same move: treat human lives as variables to optimize.
That’s why this framing lands like dystopia.
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Fuck Sam Altman (Score:2)
Okay, Coppertop (Score:2)
Didn't we already establish this in The Matrix?
While it's doubtful that humans would be useful for fuel, it's at least illustrative that they use (and emit) a hell of a lot of energy. Sam Altman's statement sounds more like a threat in that context.
But alas, that movie is 27 years old. Just about ancient mythology at this point.
Eat the rich (Score:2)
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humans are terrible with water. (Score:2)
Sam doesn't like your numbers (Score:2)
He has no clue what the numbers are, so he's just saying all these numbers are BS and making bad comparisons. Every argument he makes sounds like he has disdain for humans, but I think the reality is he is incredibly greedy. He's also probably involved in one of those utopian cults where all the members are either founders or slaves, and expect to be treated like gods. Billionaires are the biggest consumers of everything. If provided with near-infinite resources, they'd always want more.
Huh (Score:3, Funny)
Sama wants... (Score:2)
But, his paper billionaire mind is convinced his pipe dream utopia will magically appear if he spends enough of other people's money.
Re: Sam Altman Would Like To... (Score:2)
Re: Car analogy following the same logic (Score:2)
Whatever argument it takes to let tech billionaires do whatever they want. -- majority of the media
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Like the arguments you use for supporting Trump?
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I think the only comments I've posted in support of Trump was how we could get to watch a free circus if he were elected President. Why people wanted to see an encore is beyond me though, I can only assume much of the population is depressed and into self-harm.
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"So self-driving cars should be allowed to drive as fast as they want."
They are. Who is held accountable otherwise?
The point is interesting, but reality is worse.