AI’s Power Problem: Energy Is the Next Big Bottleneck
For a long time, people speculated about how much energy a single ChatGPT query uses. In June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman finally provided an answer. In his blog The Gentle Singularity, he wrote that the average query consumes about 0.34 watt-hours, roughly what an oven uses in a little over one second, or what an efficient lightbulb uses in a few minutes. Each query also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water, or one-fifteenth of…