Also in attendance was OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who made many headlines with his words and actions during the event. Their buzz blitzkrieg began Thursday with an easy photo-op layup with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other AI executives raising their hands together in a celebratory display of industry-wide solidarity. Altman and to his left Anthropic’s former colleague and current CEO, Dario Amodei, notably refused to complete the series and held each other’s hands, which was a very touching moment. Altman would continue to make news throughout the summit due to his comments on the industry’s “urgent” need for global regulation and his latent suspicion that companies might actually be using AI as a scapegoat to whitewash their layoffs.
Occasionally, Altman has received another round of earned media for an interview with Anant Goenka of The Indian Express, during which he offered some controversial rebuttals to concerns about the environmental impact of AI.
Altman began by saying that claims about ChatGPT’s consumption of “’17 gallons of water for each query’ or whatever,” were “completely false, completely insane, no connection to reality,” before saying that, well, maybe it was a legitimate concern when his company “used to do evaporative cooling in data centers.”
He went on to say that there is “reasonable” concern about the amount of energy consumed by data centers to fuel the most soulless recklessness you’ve ever seen, but he suggested that the responsibility for dealing with AI’s voracious appetite falls on the energy sector itself, which Altman thinks “needs to move very quickly to nuclear or wind and solar power.”
Altman then stunned the crowd and re-entered the discussion with a surprising truth bomb for those who still thought AI was consuming too much energy.
“It takes a lot of energy to train even one human being,” Altman said enthusiastically. “It takes 20 years of life, and before that time all the food you eat changes before you become smart. And not only that, it’s like a very extensive evolution of a hundred billion people who ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever else you had to produce, and then you took whatever you got.”
It is true that every individual and human civilization as a whole has consumed vast amounts of energy (and water) to get to where we are today. While the whole civilization of an emerging tech industry and its models and value comparisons with humans might have received praise at the summit, Altman got a better reception from the Internet. Social media immediately began to capitalize on these comments, calling them “dystopian” and “deeply anti-social and anti-human.”
Perhaps making the reaction even more telling, Altman’s energy comments rail against the disappointing lack of transparency within the industry on which our collective future now depends. There are currently no regulations requiring data centers to disclose their water and energy consumption. Furthermore, the center’s employees and business partners are typically saddled with nondisclosure agreements. This has made reporting and research on the actual expenditure level a difficult figure to determine.
At least we’ve got Sam to keep us informed while we wait for some clarity about what’s actually going on in those centers and what’s being used.
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