this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
539 points (95.8% liked)

Technology

74073 readers
2992 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
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
539
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 (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 day ago by homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
128 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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
[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think they can survive if they gatekeep and make it unaffordable to most people. There's just not enough demand or revenue that can be generated from rich people asking for chatGPT to do their homework or pretend to be their friend. They need mass adoption to survive, which is why they're trying to keep it artificially cheap in the first place.

Why do you think they haven't raised prices yet? They're trying to make everyone use it and become reliant on it.

And it's not happening. The technology won't "go away" per se, but these these expensive AI companies will fail.

[–] themurphy@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Well, if they succeed, it's because of efficiency and lowering costs. Second is how much the data and control is really worth.

The big companies is not just developing LLM's, so they might justify it with other kinds of AI that actually makes them alot of money, either trough the market or government contracts.

But who knows. This is a very new technology. If they actually make a functioning personal assitant so good, that it's inconvinient not to have it, it might work.

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago

I can see government contracts making a lot of money regardless of how functional their technology actually is.

It's more about who you know than what you can actually do when it comes to getting money from the government.