ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity
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The University of Rhode Island's AI lab estimates that GPT-5 averages just over 18 Wh per query, so putting all of ChatGPT's reported 2.5 billion requests a day through the model could see energy usage as high as 45 GWh.
A daily energy use of 45 GWh is enormous. A typical modern nuclear power plant produces between 1 and 1.6 GW of electricity per reactor per hour, so data centers running OpenAI's GPT-5 at 18 Wh per query could require the power equivalent of two to three nuclear power reactors, an amount that could be enough to power a small country.
The last 6 to 12 months of open models has pretty clearly shown you can substantially better results with the same model size or the same results with smaller model size. Eg Llama 3. 1 405B being basically equal to Llama 3.3 70B or R1-0528 being substantially better than R1. The little information available about GPT 5 suggests it uses mixture of experts and dynamic routing to different models, both of which can reduce computation cost dramatically. Additionally, simplifying the model catalogue from 9ish(?) to 3, when combined with their enormous traffic, will mean higher utilization of batch runs. Fuller batches run more efficiently on a per query basis.
Basically they can't know for sure.
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Why not... for the ignorant such as myself?
AI models require a LOT of VRAM to run. Failing that they need some serious CPU power but it’ll be dog slow.
A consumer model that is only a small fraction of the capability of the latest ChatGPT model would require at least a $2,000+ graphics card, if not more than one.
Like I run a local LLM with a etc 5070TI and the best model I can run with that thing is good for like ingesting some text to generate tags and such but not a whole lot else.
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AI models require a LOT of VRAM to run. Failing that they need some serious CPU power but it’ll be dog slow.
A consumer model that is only a small fraction of the capability of the latest ChatGPT model would require at least a $2,000+ graphics card, if not more than one.
Like I run a local LLM with a etc 5070TI and the best model I can run with that thing is good for like ingesting some text to generate tags and such but not a whole lot else.
How slow?
Loading up a website with flash and GIF in the 90s dialup slow... Or worse?
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How slow?
Loading up a website with flash and GIF in the 90s dialup slow... Or worse?
Like make a query and then go make yourself a sandwich while it spits out a word every other second slow.
There are very small models that can run on mid range graphics cards and all, but it’s not something you’d look at and say “Yeah this does most of what chatGPT does”
I have a model running on a gtx 1660 and I use it with Hoarder to parse articles and create a handful a tags for them and it’s not… great at that.
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How slow?
Loading up a website with flash and GIF in the 90s dialup slow... Or worse?
Basicly I can run 9b models on my 16gb gpu mostly fine like getting responses of lets say 10 lines in a few seconds.
Bigger models if they don't outright crash take for the same task then like 5x or 10x longer so long it isn't even useful anymore
So very worse.
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The University of Rhode Island's AI lab estimates that GPT-5 averages just over 18 Wh per query, so putting all of ChatGPT's reported 2.5 billion requests a day through the model could see energy usage as high as 45 GWh.
A daily energy use of 45 GWh is enormous. A typical modern nuclear power plant produces between 1 and 1.6 GW of electricity per reactor per hour, so data centers running OpenAI's GPT-5 at 18 Wh per query could require the power equivalent of two to three nuclear power reactors, an amount that could be enough to power a small country.
Isn't this the back plot of the game, Rain World? With the slug cats and the depressed robots stuck on a decaying world when the sapient, organic species all left?
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Isn't this the back plot of the game, Rain World? With the slug cats and the depressed robots stuck on a decaying world when the sapient, organic species all left?
Spoilers dude.
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This figure is already not bad. 40 watt hours = 0.04kWh - you know kWh? That unit on your electric bill that is around $0.18 per kWh (and data centers tend to be in lower cost electric areas, closer to $0.11/kWh.) Still, 40Wh would register on your home electric bill at $0.0072, less than a penny. For comparison, an average suburban 4 ton AC unit draws 4kW - that 40Wh request? 1/100th of an hour of AC for your home, about 36 seconds of air conditioning. I don't know that this article is making anybody "look bad" in terms of power used.
What exactly do you get for that power though?
The point is that it's too much power for little gain in return.
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FFS, I have been using Claude to code, not only do you have to tell Claude to fix compilation errors, you have to point out when Claude says "it's fixed" - "no, it's not, the function you said you added is STILL missing."
You're absolutely right!
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The University of Rhode Island's AI lab estimates that GPT-5 averages just over 18 Wh per query, so putting all of ChatGPT's reported 2.5 billion requests a day through the model could see energy usage as high as 45 GWh.
A daily energy use of 45 GWh is enormous. A typical modern nuclear power plant produces between 1 and 1.6 GW of electricity per reactor per hour, so data centers running OpenAI's GPT-5 at 18 Wh per query could require the power equivalent of two to three nuclear power reactors, an amount that could be enough to power a small country.
There's such a huge gap between what I read about GPT-5 online, versus the overwhelmingly disappointing results I get from it for both coding and general questions.
I'm beginning to think we're in the end stages of Dead Internet, where basically nothing you see online has any connection to reality.
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So instead of just saying "thank you" I now have to say "think long and hard about how much this means to me"?
Once it generates the response, there is a button you can click to make it use the reasoning model.
Why they did it that way instead of giving users the option to just set the model that they want to use ahead of time boggles the mind. Surely it would be more efficient for them to chose a model if they want ahead of time, rather than generating something that's going to be regenerated with the desired model instead.
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Isnt it just worse than 4 tho? If they didnt make it cheaper, nobody would pay...
They could have kept it at the same price, though.
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Isn't this the back plot of the game, Rain World? With the slug cats and the depressed robots stuck on a decaying world when the sapient, organic species all left?
I didn't know there was such a backstory
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For reference, this is roughly equivalent to playing a PS5 game for 4 minutes (based on their estimate) to 10 minutes (their upper bound)
::: spoiler calulation
source https://www.ecoenergygeek.com/ps5-power-consumption/Typical PS5 usage: 200 W
TV: 27 W - 134 W → call it 60 W
URI's estimate: 18 Wh / 260 W → 4 minutes
URI's upper bound: 48 Wh / 260 W →10 minutes
:::It is also the equivalent of letting a LED light bulb run for an entire day (depending on bright it is, some LED bulbs use under 2 watts of power).
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There's such a huge gap between what I read about GPT-5 online, versus the overwhelmingly disappointing results I get from it for both coding and general questions.
I'm beginning to think we're in the end stages of Dead Internet, where basically nothing you see online has any connection to reality.
People who fawn over generative AI haven't tried to use it for more than 5 seconds. I wish it could run a ttrpg game for me or even just remember the details of its original prompt but its not even close.
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OK I guess I didn't read far enough but your quote says that Deepseek uses less than Open AI?
Less than Open AI's o3, but that's because o3 was estimated to use even more power than GPT 5's 18 Wh per query.
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The University of Rhode Island's AI lab estimates that GPT-5 averages just over 18 Wh per query, so putting all of ChatGPT's reported 2.5 billion requests a day through the model could see energy usage as high as 45 GWh.
A daily energy use of 45 GWh is enormous. A typical modern nuclear power plant produces between 1 and 1.6 GW of electricity per reactor per hour, so data centers running OpenAI's GPT-5 at 18 Wh per query could require the power equivalent of two to three nuclear power reactors, an amount that could be enough to power a small country.
And how many milliwatts does an actual brain use?
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And an LLM that you could run local on a flash drive will do most of what it can do.
Can you give an example?
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How slow?
Loading up a website with flash and GIF in the 90s dialup slow... Or worse?
It's horrendously slow, unusable imo. With the larger DeepSeek distilled models I tried that didn't fit into VRAM you could easily wait 5 minutes until it was done writing its essay. Compared to just a few seconds when it does. Bit that's with a RTX 3070 Ti, not something the average ChatGPT user has lying around probably.
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And how many milliwatts does an actual brain use?
It's shockingly tricky to answer precisely, but the commonly held value is that a human brain runs on about 20w, regardless of the computational load placed on it.