this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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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 5 days ago by homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

And how many milliwatts does an actual brain use?

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's shockingly tricky to answer precisely, but the commonly held value is that a human brain runs on about 20w, regardless of the computational load placed on it.

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

So maybe .5 kwh/d. Still vastly more efficient than a code-based one.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

1.21 jigawatts

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Ahh but you need 8 for a round trip