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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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
:::I was just thinking, in more affordable electric regions of the US that's about $5 worth of electricity, per thousand requests. You'd tip a concierge $5 for most answers you get from Chat GPT (if they could provide them...) and the concierge is likely going to use that $5 to buy a gallon and a half of gasoline, which generates a whole lot more CO2 than the nuclear / hydro / solar mixed electrical generation, in reasonably priced electric regions of the US...
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That are 25 request per kWh.
At 10 to 25cents per kWh that's 1cent per request. That doesn't seem to be too expensive.Which is why they're giving everybody free access, for now.
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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"?
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."
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That are 25 request per kWh.
At 10 to 25cents per kWh that's 1cent per request. That doesn't seem to be too expensive.Hmmm. Sure. But I find people don't understand how much one kWh really is. A 500W drill can twist your arm. Imagine yourself twisting someones arm with all you got for a whole hour. Or idk. Either way it's a lot of energy.
And then you think about how much more energy a car uses then a human does. And then you find out about hot water...
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I have an extreme dislike for OpenAI, Altman, and people like him, but the reasoning behind this article is just stuff some guy has pulled from his backside. There's no facts here, it's just "I believe XYX" with nothing to back it up.
We don't need to make up nonsense about the LLM bubble. There's plenty of valid enough criticisms as is.
By circulating a dumb figure like this, all you're doing is granting OpenAI the power to come out and say "actually, it only uses X amount of power. We're so great!", where X is a figure that on its own would seem bad, but compared to this inflated figure sounds great. Don't hand these shitty companies a marketing win.
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.
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OpenAI just needs to harness lightning. Incoming weather control tech.
I myself am looking forward to dyson spheres powering chat gpt 6.
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I mean no not at all, but local LLMs are a less energy reckless way to use AI
Why not... for the ignorant such as myself?
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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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