Last Friday, onstage at a major AI summit in India, Sam Altman wanted to address what he called an \u201cunfair\u201d criticism. The OpenAI CEO was asked by a reporter from The Indian Express about the natural resources required to train and run generative-AI models. Altman immediately pushed back. Chatbots do require a lot of power, yes, but have you thought about all of the resources demanded by human beings across our evolutionary history?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt also takes a lot of energy to train a human,\u201d Altman told<\/a> a packed pavilion. \u201cIt takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took, like, the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science and whatever to produce you, and then you took whatever, you know, you took.\u201d<\/p>\n He continued: \u201cThe fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question, versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.\u201d<\/p>\n Altman\u2019s comments are easy to pick apart. The energy used by the brain<\/a> is significantly less than even efficient frontier models for simple queries, not to mention the laptops and smartphones people use to prompt AI models. It is true that people have to consume actual sustenance before they \u201cget smart,\u201d though this is also a helpful bit of redirection on Altman\u2019s part\u2014the real concern with AI is not really the resources it demands, but the amount it contributes to climate change. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is at levels not seen in million of years<\/a>\u2014it has been driven not by the evolution of the 117 billion people and all of the other critters to have ever existed in the course of evolution, but by contemporary human society and combustion turbines akin to those OpenAI is setting up at its Stargate data centers. Other data centers, too, are building private, gas-fired power plants\u2014which collectively will likely be capable of generating enough electricity<\/a> for, and emitting as much greenhouse-gas emissions as, dozens of major American cities\u2014or extending the life<\/a> of coal plants. (OpenAI, which has a corporate partnership with the business side of this magazine, did not respond to a request for comment when I reached out to ask about Altman\u2019s remarks.)<\/p>\n