“People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote in an aside in a long blog post last week. The average query, Altman wrote, uses 0.34 watt-hours of energy: “About what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes.”
For a company with 800 million weekly active users (and growing), the question of how much energy all these searches are using is becoming an increasingly pressing one. But experts say Altman’s figure doesn’t mean much