What Are the Cultists Going to Do About AI Emissions?

Researcher Jesse Dodge did some back-of-the-napkin math on the amount of energy AI chatbots use.

“One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes,” he says. “So, you can imagine with millions of people using something like that every day, that adds up to a really large amount of electricity.”

He’s a senior research analyst at the Allen Institute for AI and has been studying how artificial intelligence consumes energy. To generate its answers, AI uses far more power than traditional internet uses, like search queries or cloud storage. According to a report by Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.

And as AI gets more sophisticated, it needs more energy. In the U.S., a majority of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels like coal and gas which are primary drivers of climate change.