Your ChatGPT query is killing nature
Whether ChatGPT has improved human lives or not is up for debate. But its energy consumption is definitely damaging the environment
Every time you pose a question to ChatGPT, it uses approximately 0.0029 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is almost 10X the amount of energy required for a standard Google search
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ChatGPT hit an estimated 100 million monthly users within just two months of its launch in 2022. While many see it as a useful tool which eases human effort, others see it slowly taking over jobs, and making people less creative and productive. But that isn’t the only concern that the advent of ChatGPT has brought forward. For every help that the artificial intelligence is providing a human, it is also taking a lot from the environment. As per a recent report by a US-based research platform BestBrokers.com, for answering questions alone, ChatGPT consumes a whopping 226.82 million kilowatt-hours on average every year, which amounts to an expenditure of $29.71 million.
ChatGPT’s Energy Consumption for responding to prompts and its cost in the US
Every time you pose a question to ChatGPT, it uses approximately 0.0029 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is almost 10X the amount of energy required for a standard Google search, which uses around 0.0003 kilowatt-hours per search, as reported by The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
Also read: How will AI reshape our world? It's really up to us
How much energy does ChatGPT consume every week?
As of November 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reports that 100 million users engage with ChatGPT weekly, generating about 1.5 billion queries. This equates to over 214 million daily requests, consuming more than 500,000 kilowatt-hours of energy each day. For comparison, the average US household uses around 29 kilowatt-hours daily, meaning ChatGPT uses over 21,600 times more power than a typical household each day.
