this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
423 points (95.3% liked)

Technology

74073 readers
2818 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

Tech hasn't improved that much in the last in the last decade. All that's happened is that more cores have been added. The single-thread speed of a CPU is stagnant.

My home PC consumes more power than my Pentium 3 consumed 25 years ago. All efficiency gains are lost to scaling for more processing power. All improvements in processing power are lost to shitty, bloated code.

We don't have the tech for AI. We're just scaling up to the electrical senand demand of a small country and pretending we have the tech for AI.

[–] Caitlyynn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 hours ago

Not even the ai tech itself is enough for ai

[–] SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 hours ago

It's the muscle car era: can't make things more efficient to compete with Asia? MAKE IT BIGGER AND CONSUME MORE

[–] ChokingHazard@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago

This is nonsense, an M1 runs many multiples faster and at much lower wattage.