Sam Altman compared AI energy use to the cost of raising a human being

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pushed back against criticism of AI's environmental impact while speaking at an event hosted by The Indian Express as part of a major AI summit in India, calling some of the concerns around ChatGPT completely disconnected from reality.

He was especially blunt about water usage claims circulating online. Statements suggesting each ChatGPT query consumes 17 gallons of water are, in his words, "completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality."

Altman acknowledged the issue was real back when data centers relied on evaporative cooling, but said that's no longer the case. When an interviewer – citing a conversation with Bill Gates – asked whether a single ChatGPT query uses energy equivalent to 1.5 iPhone battery charges, Altman replied:

"There's no way it's anything close to that much."

He did call total industry energy consumption a legitimate concern, saying the world needs to "move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly." He also took issue with how many comparisons are framed – specifically, pitting the cost of training an AI model against the energy needed for a single human inference query.

As an alternative frame, Altman suggested comparing AI to humans directly:

"It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."

In his view, if you compare a trained model to a human answering the same question, AI may already be ahead on energy efficiency.

Tech companies aren't legally required to disclose their energy or water usage, which means independent researchers are left to study these figures on their own.