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How much energy does ChatGPT use? - by Josh You - Epoch AI

epochai.substack.com · 5,380 words · saved by 1 readers

This Gradient Updates issue explores how much energy ChatGPT uses per query, revealing it's 10x less than common estimates.

Credit to Alex Erben and Ege Erdil for substantial help with research and calculations. In this issue, “we” refers to our collective judgment. A commonly-cited claim is that powering an individual ChatGPT query requires around 3 watt-hours of electricity, or 10 times as much as a Google search.1 This is often brought up to express concern over AI’s impact on the environment, climate change, or the electric grid. However, we believe that this figure of 3 watt-hours per query is likely an overestimate. In this issue, we revisit this question using a similar methodology, but using up-to-date…

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