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ChatGPT, OpenAI’s revolutionary artificial intelligence chatbot, may not be as innocent as it seems. According to a new study, ChatGPT consumes a lot of water.
ChatGPT, which entered our lives in November and continues to stay in our lives both on its own and by being added to many services, does not seem to be very successful in terms of resource consumption. According to a study, ChatGPT raises questions especially about water consumption.
ChatGPT’s water waste
According to University of California researcher Shaolei Ren, ChatGPT and similar LLMs use up to 500 milliliters of water for every 20 to 50 prompts or questions that users ask. In a paper published in Arxiv, the researcher noted that 500 ml may not seem like a lot, but with ChatGPT being used globally by users in combination, the water usage is enormous. In August, 180.5 million unique people visited ChatGPT. The total number of visitors was 1.43 billion. On the other hand, it was reported in previous months that the amount of water used in the training of the GPT-3 model was 700,000 liters.
The verification of this research is actually provided by Microsoft (Microsoft is the largest investor in ChatGPT creator OpenAI.) Microsoft’s 2022 environmental report states that most of the water increase in Microsoft’s 2022 environmental report is due to artificial intelligence. Microsoft’s water consumption increased by 34 percent to 6.4 billion liters in 2022. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem and said it is exploring ways to measure its energy use and carbon footprint. Internally, the software giant is also working to make large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT (GPT-4, 3.5, etc.) less energy intensive.
Microsoft plans to achieve carbon negative, water positive and zero waste goals by 2030. However, OpenAI has also acknowledged the issue of water usage and said it is looking for ways to make LLMs more energy efficient. While the amount of water used to power LLMs is quite staggering, it is worth noting that these modern LLMs are not that old, so methods can be developed to reduce water and energy use over time.
