“People are often Curious to know how much energy uses a request from Chatppt, “Sam Altman, the CEO of Openai, wrote in one side in a Long blog arte Last week. The average query, Altman wrote, uses 0.34 Watthers of energy: “About that an overdult uses in just over a second, or a high efficiency bulb would use in a few minutes.”
For a company with 800 million weekly active users (and growth), The question of the amount of energy that all of this research uses becomes incomplete pressure. But experts say that Altman’s figure does not mean much without much more public context of Openai on the way in which it happens to this calculation – including the definition of what a “warned” request is, where it includes or not the generation of images, and where is or not Altman, including additional energy consumption, such as the formation of AI models and reorganized Openai servers.
As an answer, Sasha Luccioni, the advance on the climate of the company Ai Hugging Face, does not put too much stock in the Altman issue. “He withdrew that from his ass,” she said. (Openi has not regained a request for more information on how it arrives at this number.)
While AI takes control of our life, it is also promised to transform our energy systems, supensular carbon emissions just while we are trying to fight climate change. Now, in a set of new and growing research is the concessionaire to put a hard number on the quantity of carbon that we are in the process of putting in place in use.
This effort is complicated by the fact that the main players like OpenAi have revealed little environmental information. An analysis subject to peer exam this week by Luccioni and three other authors examine the need for greater environmental transparency in AI models. In the new analysis of Luccioni, she and her colleagues use data from OpenIn the classification of large -language model traffic (LLM), to note that 84% of the use of LLM in May 2025 was for models with zero environmental disclosure. This means that consumers massively choose models with unknown environmental impacts completed.
“It blows me that you can buy a car and know how many kilometers for Gallon consumers, but we use all of these AI tools every day and we have absolutely no efficiency measure, emission factors, nothing,” said Muccioni. “It is not mandated, it is not regulatory. Since we are with the climate crisis, it should be at the top of the agenda of regulars everywhere.”
As a resauture for this lack of transparency, says Luccioni, the public is exposed to estimates that have no sense that is considered evangelical. You may have heard, for example, that the request for Chatgpt Averal takes 10 times more energy than Google Auveral research. Luccioni and his colleagues find this claim to a public remark that John Hennessy, the president of Alphabet, the mother company of Google, made in 2023.
A complaint made by a member of the board of directors of a company (Google) on the product of another company to which he has no relationship (OPENAI) is at best tenuous – but finds the analysis of Luccioni, this figure has been repeatedly repeated in press and policy reports. (While I was writing this piece, I had land with this exact statistic.)
