Comment on OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models
Womble@piefed.world 13 hours agoDo you have a source for that? Because given a chatgpt query takes a similar amount of energy to running a hair dryer for a few seconds i find it hard to believe.
rimu@piefed.social 12 hours ago
We see a lot of those kinds of comparisons. Thing is, you run a hair dryer once per day at most. Or it's compared to a google search, often. Again, most people will do a handful of searches each day. A ChatGPT conversation can be hundreds of messages back and forth. A Claude Code session can go for hours and involve millions of tokens. An individual AI inference might be pretty tame but the quantity of them is another level.
If it was so efficient then they wouldn't be building Manhatten-sized datacenters.
Womble@piefed.world 12 hours ago
ok, but running a hairdryer for 5 minutes is well up into the hundreds of queries which is more than the vast majority of people will use in a week. The OP was talking about it being 1-2% of energy usage, so that include transport heating and heavy industry. It just doesnt pass the smell test to me that something where a weeks worth of usage is exceeded by a person drying their hair once is comparable with such vast users of energy.