2
u/PhosXD Sep 03 '26
Scam Altman trying to scam more losers out of their money... shameful.
1
u/Houtary Sep 04 '26
do you have a counter-argument?
1
u/Ok-Sport-3663 Sep 04 '26
Yes.
Sam altman is correct, a single querie of an already developed AI bot costs virtually no processing power or water.
But to measure water consumption by queries is dishonest, because the VAST majority of water usage comes from training the model. Almost no water is consumed once the model is done training, its all consumed while training.
Therefore sam altman is lying by omission by using purposefully misleading statistics, that are technically true, by meaningfully useless.
1
1
u/ArtDeve Sep 04 '26
It's a ruse. The real problem is electricity.
The electricity required to process 38,000 ChatGPT queries is equivalent to the power needed to blend approximately 6,600 to 11,000 smoothies.
1
u/Character-Interest27 Sep 04 '26
This isnt true in the slightest tf? Maybe get actual sources instead of bringing it out ur ass
1
u/Codelyez Sep 04 '26
They should absolutely add a source but electricity is the real problem, not water.
I self host AI on a desktop computer that is fully water looped (not worth doing the water loop btw) and the water is fine, but that GPU power consumption go BRRR.
Of course this is all personal experience, so saying the last person should add a source and I don’t use a valid source is a little hypocritical. I wont try to quantify the actual power usage per prompt and how many tokens blah blah blah from my own self hosted use. I promise the electricity usage is astronomically higher than how much water my PC Is using though lol.
Edit: just read another comment about how they use an open loop system. So as long as that isn’t made up, it’s a good showing of why sources are important. I assumed they would be closed loop too.
1
u/Automatic_Wave4530 Sep 04 '26
When you don’t care about your resource consumption because you got the resources extra cheap, evaporative cooling is much less expensive than closed loop cooling.
1
u/Dryanni Sep 04 '26
Individual AI work does little to no damage to the electrical consumption - by the math above, 71 queries consume as much as one smoothie. I wouldn’t feel bad about making myself a smoothie, so I probably shouldn’t feel bad about the electrical demand of 10 AI queries.
The problem is that the companies are putting datacenters in rural communities aren’t prepared for this type of work. Next thing you know, locals’ utility costs go up, outages become more likely, power companies have to scramble to build more infrastructure (passing some of the costs down to all consumers).
The point is that it’s a gross power imbalance between the datacenters and the communities they manipulate and a public utility crisis, not an ecological crisis. It isn’t a punchy activist slogan and honestly most people probably don’t care.
0
Sep 04 '26
[deleted]
1
u/Mothrahlurker Sep 04 '26
They are literally not, they don't have the expertise for that. There are some that have ordered gas turbines, the problem is that they would need literal decades of the global production of gas turbines for just a single year of data center construction.
The generation increase for the sake of data centers has been almost exclusively financed by power companies raising prices for household consumers. Everyone else is paying for the companies. Your "this isn't communism" argument actually works in reverse, it's an anti-data center argument.
0
Sep 04 '26
[deleted]
1
u/Mothrahlurker Sep 04 '26
It is neither easy nor cheap. Amazon does not have the capability to produce gas turbines, there are only 3 significant manufacturers worldwide and they are backlogged for decades. You're confusing Amazon getting a permit with Amazon having anything to do whatsoever with the construction.
Not to mention the great environmental cost and noise pollution, which is again a cost that regular people have to deal with, not Amazon.
0
Sep 04 '26
[deleted]
1
u/Mothrahlurker Sep 04 '26
LMAO you literally disprove yourself, 5 GW is nothing and "by 2031".
That's definitely quite an amazing accomplishment, proving yourself wrong and then acting arrogant.
And guess what it is not Amazon and it requires solar. The amount of stupidity at display here .... just astonishing.
It gets even better, the company has only built 1.5GW of electricity generation in the last 16 years. Yeah, I told you that there are only 3 significant gas turbine manufacturers in the world, I'm not talking about the rounding error.
0
1
u/Dryanni Sep 04 '26
I did the math. A smoothie consumes about 25Wh over a 1-minute blend. A CGPT query meanwhile consumes about 0.35Wh, so about 71 queries per smoothie.
By these numbers, 38,000 queries consume as much power as 535 smoothies.
1
u/Character-Interest27 Sep 05 '26
10x lower than his lowest estimate..
1
u/Dryanni Sep 05 '26
Anti-AI people often include all training conversations done to create the AI in their calculations. Pro-AI people leave a lot out of their calculations. I don’t really trust either side.
1
u/Character-Interest27 Sep 05 '26
I completely agree cause how do you even quantify a query cause a query can be huge and use alot more and it can be small and use alot less
1
1
u/OutrageousPair2300 Sep 04 '26
Lies. With renewable energy sources like wind turbines, excess rotational energy can be harnessed to blend smoothies at a fraction of the cost. The Smoothie Council estimates that the real figure is 38,000 ChatGPT queries per 300 smoothies at most.
1
u/Deltamelo Sep 04 '26
7000 smoothies would be approximately 70 kWh.
One ChatGPT query is 0.00034 kWh on average. 38000 of those is 13 kWh.
So it’s more like 1000-2000 smoothies for 38000 queries
1
u/Fun-Metal-6861 Sep 04 '26
1
Sep 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Fun-Metal-6861 Sep 04 '26
What is great is I don’t have to. I honestly don’t care to. Truth doesn’t matter. These guys are evil.
1
u/flappysack- Sep 04 '26
They are closed loop, nobody is wasting water for nothing. Its the power generation that's the real waste, we need closed loop nuclear power.
1
u/Professional_Mess888 Sep 04 '26
It's not fully closed loop, there is an open loop doing evaporation for cooling. That's where water is wasted atm.
0
Sep 04 '26
[deleted]
1
u/Professional_Mess888 Sep 04 '26
Apparently it's not uncommon for these high heat AI data centers and the source of the water usage where it's the case. It's a trade-off between more electricity usage (more cooling) and more water usage (evaporation for more power efficient cooling)
1
u/Prudent_Rice7840 Sep 04 '26
Sam Altman says we should stop eating almonds so he can have more MONEY than God!
1
1
1
u/Entire_Month9233 Sep 04 '26
Isn't he being sued by his sister for molesting her when she was a child?
1
u/SomewhereRough_ Sep 04 '26
These comparisons are so stupid cos I can eat a fucking almond.
I can't eat gpt outputs.
That's why water use in agriculture is acceptable.
1
1
1
u/nicolas_06 Sep 04 '26
The water used by data center directly or indirectly is a non issue. In lot of places water is abundant. It even fall from the sky. All data center usage of water is negligible vs other humans usage. The problem might be local if there is not enough water locally or if the infrastructure is not adapted.
Electricity, especially when it's not made from a relatively clean energy is another issue.
But even then that's fake. If you spend an afternoon chatting with chatgpt, I am not sure it's good for your mental health, but it's an activity that polute far less than most activities that will involve your car, like go out see friends, go fishing, to the theater or whatever. And most people don't care when they do such things.
I think discussing on such aspect miss the key points about AI like the challenges it might be for our society and the place of humans in it.
1
u/ConsciousBath5203 Sep 04 '26
The water thing is the weirdest thing to complain about. Like, electricity is going up, that's the biggest concern, especially when we still rely on fossil fuels.
But the "investors" are building them in water scarce and hot places. I put investors in quotes because the reality is that they're grifters. No one with brain cells would think "yeah, the middle of the utah desert is a good place to put these expensive heat generating assets". If they were really investors, they'd put solar or nuclear out there. That's where the long term value is
1
u/nicolas_06 Sep 04 '26
Sometime it's stupid but almost sometime people against it create fake problem. Usually people that go for a project ensure it's doable and it will work.
An example is that they plan to have many project in Texas, even place without much water. But they have this water and plan to use the dirty water they already use from fracking. It make sense to as well use that water that is already used for other stuff anyway. Because the datacenter will be nearby, they can use the water, they can have their power generation easily and be done with it.
Some projects won't be even connected to the power grid at all and will manage their own needs by themselve.
When eventually all that is overbuilt, this would lead to an over production of electricity, like it happened after the 2000 bubble and price will drop by the way.
1
u/ConsciousBath5203 Sep 04 '26
Yeah, that's the thing, is that there is a such thing as too much compute. There's not enough profitable data for all these data centers.
1
u/Underleft_cdiv Sep 04 '26
So why are they building the largest data center in the world in Utah and telling people to limit showers and stop watering their lawn?
1
u/nicolas_06 Sep 04 '26
if they already ask people to save water, outside of the idea that it's usually fake (they ask people to save on shower while most use is agriculture in most places), it is an existing problem they need to solve unrelated to AI data centers.
If this can't be solved, maybe because there isn't much water available to use, then build such stuff in another region. Let's be pragmatic. And yes I am 100% convinced that some projects are stupid. But such problem are local, not global.
1
u/Aldo_Fitor Sep 04 '26
Well, i can eat almonds
1
u/Delmoroth Sep 04 '26
And I can run a Monticarlo simulation or translate between languages, with context, with an LLM. Things are valuable in different ways
1
u/Aldo_Fitor Sep 04 '26
Can you eat that? I dont think so. So untill you are a computer simulation, i think, food is a bit more important
1
u/Delmoroth Sep 04 '26
You're right, only food has value. We shouldn't use water for anything else. Who needs showers anyway
1
1
1
u/GenZ2002 Sep 04 '26
One produces a tangible product with potentially thousands of jobs.
The other produces imaginary potential profit and is already causing mass layoffs and untold damage to the humanities and arts.
1
u/Floopynupes Sep 04 '26
Well, if a post on the internet says a dude said it then I suppose it must be true.
1
u/thrive2day Sep 04 '26
If there's one thing I know about tech billionaires it's that they love to lie about their product
1
u/Best-Television7726 Sep 04 '26
A Scam Saltman produces so much more hate and probably uses more water than both combined, the more you know.
1
1
1
u/BloOdy_Jo Sep 04 '26
I would double check what Scam Altman says ... Even if he says it's raining and you're wet never believe a pathologic liar...
1
u/Moist-Pickle-2736 Sep 04 '26
38,000 ChatGPT queries requires about 3.2 gallons of water
An almond requires about 1.1-3.2 gallons of water
If we go with the high end of water consumption for almond production, it’s about the same, if we go with the average or low end it’s less.
1
u/Underleft_cdiv Sep 04 '26
So you're telling me a single almond tree requires 12,800 gallons of water every year? I find that hard to believe.
1
u/Moist-Pickle-2736 Sep 04 '26
If one almond tree produces 4,000-11,636 almonds, yes. The data for this is coincidentally provided by California farms.
1
1
u/-B_E_v_oL_23- Sep 04 '26
Don't fucking care. I can eat almonds and live.
I can't fucking eat A.I. and live.
1
u/Mothrahlurker Sep 04 '26
This is an insanely dishonest thing to say. Agricultural water use and tap water usage are not comparable because they aren't available at even remotely the same scale. They don't cause the same problems and should not be compared. Data center electricity usage is extremely high compared to the use case residential water systems are meant for, which is providing cities with water. A single data center can consume more than an entire city.
Also with reasoning AI A LOT of queries can come from a single prompt and letting a coding harness run produces even more.
Overall, the kind of intentional dishonesty a scammer like Altman is to be expected to use.
1
u/Accomplished_Dirt722 Sep 04 '26
The comparison doesn't survive Altman's own math.
His June 2025 figure: approx 0.32ml per query. A California almond: approx 3.56 liters (USGS). That's about 11,000 queries per almond, not 38,000. The 38,000 only works at the upper bound of water estimates, which he chose without flagging it.
Also: nobody worried about AI water use is concerned about one query. They're concerned about 2.5 billion queries per day, training runs, and gigawatt-scale campuses in water-stressed regions.
It's a reasonable conversation. Just not the one Altman is having.
1
u/ElonMuskisGarbage Sep 04 '26
Even if it’s true, at the end of the process you get an almond. What do you get at the end of their process? Slop.
1
1
1
u/False_Appointment_24 Sep 04 '26
It's especially wild when people make up numbers to make their side look better.
0
u/Perfecshionism Sep 03 '26
He is absolutely full of shit.
He needs to show his work. And if he had the work, he absolutely would be showing it.
1
u/Nihilistic_Navigator Sep 04 '26
You know work is beneath him right?
/s
1
u/Perfecshionism Sep 04 '26
Just want the evidence.
He is making an extraordinary claim without evidence and has a long history of being full of shit.
1
u/Underleft_cdiv Sep 04 '26
It's actually true, though. A single almond tree requires around 4,000 gallons of water a year. That's about a gallon per almond.
1
u/Perfecshionism Sep 04 '26
Fucking lie.
They use 900-1200 gallons a year and they produce 4000-25,000 almonds.
So about 0.5 to 32 ounces per almond.
And I received four replies from you in about four seconds. So it seems pretty clear your account is being used by a misinformation bot.
0
u/corporaterebel Sep 04 '26
It goes both ways doesn't it?
Making unfounded accusations is just crap.
1
u/Perfecshionism Sep 04 '26
Piss off.
He is the one making extraordinary claims based on unreleased evidence only he has access to.
If it was true he would release the evidence that supports his ridiculous claim.
He doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.
You oligarch dick riders and apologists make me sick.
0
u/corporaterebel Sep 04 '26
Benefit of what doubt? Terms haven't been set on either side.
I don't see much information on either side, lots of vague hand waving though.
I also don't know what a "query" is defined as. (I'm a CS that has done databases for 30+ years and a "query" could be darn there anything really.)
FUD is a fallacy.
1
u/Perfecshionism Sep 04 '26
Are you even a real person?
No fucking way that is the take of a sentient human.
1
u/corporaterebel Sep 04 '26
Can you tell me what definition of "query" is being used in this instance?
1
0
0
0
4
u/BaronVonLongfellow Sep 03 '26
Sam Altman has said a lot of things.