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OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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All the people here chastising LLMs for resource wastage, I swear to god if you aren't vegan...
Whataboutism isn’t useful. Nobody is living the perfect life. Every improvement we can make towards a more sustainable way of living is good. Everyone needs to start somewhere and even if they never move to make more changes at least they made the one.
1 beef burger is equivalent in water consumption to 7.5million chatgpt queries.
I did a quick calculation and got to around 500 queries per quarter pounder. Lot of guesstimation and rounding though, but I’m pretty sure I got close enough to know that you’re off by quite a lot.
Edit to add: I used 21.9kg CO2 per 1kg of beef and 4.32 grams per ChatGPT query for my rough estimate.
However that 4.32 number is already over a year old. Chances are it’s way outdated but everyone still keeps on quoting it. It definitely does not take into account that ChatGPT often “thinks” now, because chain of thought is likely as expensive as multiple queries by itself. Additionally the models are more advanced than a year ago, but also more costly and that CO2 amount everyone keeps quoting doesn’t even mention which model they used. If anyone can find the original source of this number I’d be very curious.
The CO2 calculation is also useful and interesting, but they did say "water consumption"
Fair.
Water use comes out to about 150.000 chatGPT queries per quarter pounder. Using 10ml per prompt and 15.000l per kg of beef.
Still off by many orders of magnitude.
Also that’s just the running costs. If we go into training we’re looking at a comparison the other way around. Training GPT-3 cost Microsoft 700.000 liters of water. So that’s 466.6 quarter pounders.
Do you have a citation handy for that?