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OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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I mean, AI is using like 1-2% of human energy and that's fucking wild.
My take away is we need more clean energy generation. Good things we've got countries like China leading the way in nuclear and renewables!!
All I know is that I'm getting real tired of this Matrix / Idiocracy Mash-up Movie we're living in.
Yes, China is producing a lot of solar panels (a good thing!) but the percentage of renewables is actually going down. They are adding coal faster than solar.
Do 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.
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.
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 post I replied to was talking about it being 1-2% of energy usage, so that includes 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.