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Talking to ChatGPT costs 5ml of water, not 500ml | sean goedecke

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There’s a common claim on the internet that ChatGPT consumes half a litre of water for every 5-50 responses. Here are some randomly-chosen examples: This seems kind of scary - when you go and ask a question and some follow-up questions, is it equivalent to pouring out a bottle of water on the ground every time? No, it isn’t. As I’ll argue, the real figure is around 5ml of water. It comes from a paper called Making AI Less Thirsty: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models, published one year ago in October 2023. At the time of publishing, ChatGPT was GPT-3 - GPT-4 had just come out, but too recently to receive any serious analysis in the paper. This paper is mostly about estimating water usage efficiency in datacenters, and using those estimates to translate a power usage value into a water usage value. Let’s leave aside that efficiency question for the moment (it’s a slower-moving landscape, so more likely to be correct). The power usage stat is 0.004kWh/page o

There’s a common claim on the internet that ChatGPT consumes half a litre of water for every 5-50 responses. Here are some randomly-chosen examples: https://news.abplive.com/technology/microsoft-water-consumption-iowa-ai-bard-chatgpt-1629090 https://sooon.medium.com/the-environmental-cost-of-ai-how-much-water-does-chatgpt-use-7a638635cff6 https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/microsofts-water-usage-surges-by-thousands-of-gallons-after-the-launch-of-chatgpt-study-397951-2023-09-11 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/ Thi

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