Sam Altman would like remind you that humans use a lot of energy, too

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed claims about AI's water usage as 'completely untrue,' specifically targeting the widely circulated figure of 17 gallons of water per ChatGPT query. He acknowledged total energy consumption as a legitimate concern, advocating for a shift to nuclear, wind, and solar energy. Altman argued that comparisons of AI training costs to single human queries are unfair, countering that training a human takes 20 years and enormous resources — and that AI is likely already more energy-efficient per inference query than a human answering the same question.