this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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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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[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 24 points 4 days ago (3 children)

There's such a huge gap between what I read about GPT-5 online, versus the overwhelmingly disappointing results I get from it for both coding and general questions.

I'm beginning to think we're in the end stages of Dead Internet, where basically nothing you see online has any connection to reality.

[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

People who fawn over generative AI haven't tried to use it for more than 5 seconds. I wish it could run a ttrpg game for me or even just remember the details of its original prompt but its not even close.

[–] ghen@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago

The stock market is barely connected to reality and that is required to be updated every 3 months by every single company. Just imagine what the internet's going to be like.

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Well yeah, it's a for-profit company. They exist solely to make money, that's their entire goal.

It's almost all marketing and has been for a while. ChatGPT peaked with 4o (and 4.5 if you used their API), 4.1 was a step backwards despite them calling it an improvement, and 5 was another step backwards.

They are not any closer to AGI, and we're not going to see AGI from LLMs no matter how much they claim just how close we are to seeing AGI.

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 139 points 5 days ago (5 children)

I don't care how rough the estimate is, LLMs are using insane amounts of power, and the message I'm getting here is that the newest incarnation uses even more.

BTW a lot of it seems to be just inefficient coding as Deepseek has shown.

[–] ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 50 points 5 days ago (1 children)

BTW a lot of it seems to be just inefficient coding as Deepseek has shown.

Kind of? Inefficient coding is definitely a part of it. But a large part is also just the iterative nature of how these algorithms operate. We might be able to improve that via code optimization a little bit. But without radically changing how these engines operates it won't make a big difference.

The scope of the data being used and trained on is probably a bigger issue. Which is why there's been a push by some to move from LLMs to SLMs. We don't need the model to be cluttered with information on geology, ancient history, cooking, software development, sports trivia, etc if it's only going to be used for looking up stuff on music and musicians.

But either way, there's a big 'diminishing returns' factor to this right now that isn't being appreciated. Typical human nature: give me that tiny boost in performance regardless of the cost, because I don't have to deal with. It's the same short-sighted shit that got us into this looming environmental crisis.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 17 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Coordinated SLM governors that can redirect queries to the appropriate SLM seems like a good solution.

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[–] kautau@lemmy.world 24 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

And water usage which will also increase as fires increase and people have trouble getting access to clean water

https://techhq.com/news/ai-water-footprint-suggests-that-large-language-models-are-thirsty/

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 14 points 5 days ago (5 children)

It would only take one regulation to fix that:

Datacenters that use liquid cooling must use closed loop systems.

The reason they dont, and why they setup in the desert, is because water is incredibly cheap and energy to cool a closed loop system is expensive. So they use evaporative open loop systems.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Unfortunately I wonder if it’s more expensive to set up a closed loop system that’s really expensive or to buy lawmakers that will vote against bills saying you should do so and it’s a tale old as time

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)
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[–] ThePinkUnicorn@lemdro.id 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

For training yes, but during operation by this studies measure Deepseek actually has an even higher power draw, according to the article. Even models with more efficient programming use insane amounts of electricity

This was higher than all other tested models, except for OpenAI's o3 (25.35 Wh) and Deepseek's R1 (20.90 Wh).

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[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 116 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (9 children)

I have an extreme dislike for OpenAI, Altman, and people like him, but the reasoning behind this article is just stuff some guy has pulled from his backside. There's no facts here, it's just "I believe XYX" with nothing to back it up.

We don't need to make up nonsense about the LLM bubble. There's plenty of valid enough criticisms as is.

By circulating a dumb figure like this, all you're doing is granting OpenAI the power to come out and say "actually, it only uses X amount of power. We're so great!", where X is a figure that on its own would seem bad, but compared to this inflated figure sounds great. Don't hand these shitty companies a marketing win.

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[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (5 children)

For reference, this is roughly equivalent to playing a PS5 game for 4 minutes (based on their estimate) to 10 minutes (their upper bound)

calulationsource https://www.ecoenergygeek.com/ps5-power-consumption/

Typical PS5 usage: 200 W

TV: 27 W - 134 W → call it 60 W

URI's estimate: 18 Wh / 260 W → 4 minutes

URI's upper bound: 48 Wh / 260 W →10 minutes

[–] buttnugget@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

I love playing PS5 games!

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[–] AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Isn't this the back plot of the game, Rain World? With the slug cats and the depressed robots stuck on a decaying world when the sapient, organic species all left?

[–] Patches@ttrpg.network 14 points 4 days ago

Spoilers dude.

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 5 points 4 days ago

I didn't know there was such a backstory

[–] yesman@lemmy.world 43 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I think AI power usage has an upside. No amount of hype can pay the light bill.

AI is either going to be the most valuable tech in history, or it's going to be a giant pile of ash that used to be VC capital.

[–] themurphy@lemmy.ml 18 points 5 days ago (3 children)

It will not go away at this point. Too many daily users already, who uses it for study, work, chatting, looking things up.

If not OpenAI, it will be another service.

[–] krashmo@lemmy.world 20 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Those same things were said about hundreds of other technologies that no longer exist in any meaningful sense. Current usage of a technology, which in this specific case I would argue is largely frivolous anyway, is not an accurate indicator of future usage.

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 8 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Those users are not paying a sustainable price, they're using chatbots because they're kept artificially cheap to increase use rates.

Force them to pay enough to make these bots profitable and I guarantee they'll stop.

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[–] Deflated0ne@lemmy.world 23 points 5 days ago (5 children)

And an LLM that you could run local on a flash drive will do most of what it can do.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago (6 children)

I mean no not at all, but local LLMs are a less energy reckless way to use AI

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 5 days ago

Fucking Doc Brown could power a goddamn time machine with this many jiggawatts, fuck I hate being stuck in this timeline.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 34 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Bit of a clickbait. We can't really say it without more info.

But it's important to point out that the lab's test methodology is far from ideal.

The team measured GPT-5’s power consumption by combining two key factors: how long the model took to respond to a given request, and the estimated average power draw of the hardware running it.

What we do know is that the price went down. So this could be a strong indication the model is, in fact, more energy efficient. At least a stronger indicator than response time.

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[–] antihumanitarian@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

The last 6 to 12 months of open models has pretty clearly shown you can substantially better results with the same model size or the same results with smaller model size. Eg Llama 3. 1 405B being basically equal to Llama 3.3 70B or R1-0528 being substantially better than R1. The little information available about GPT 5 suggests it uses mixture of experts and dynamic routing to different models, both of which can reduce computation cost dramatically. Additionally, simplifying the model catalogue from 9ish(?) to 3, when combined with their enormous traffic, will mean higher utilization of batch runs. Fuller batches run more efficiently on a per query basis.

Basically they can't know for sure.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago (2 children)

How the hell are they going to sustain the expense to power that? Setting aside the environmental catastrophe that this kind of "AI" entails, they're just not very profitable.

[–] gdog05@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago

Look at all the layoffs they've been able to implement with the mere threat that AI has taken their jobs. It's very profitable, just not in a sustainable way. But sustainability isn't the goal. Feudal state mindset in the populace is.

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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (19 children)

I don’t buy the research paper at all. Of course we have no idea what OpenAI does because they aren’t open at all, but Deepseek's publish papers suggest it’s much more complex than 1 model per node… I think they recommended like a 576 GPU cluster, with a scheme to split experts.

That, and going by the really small active parameter count of gpt-oss, I bet the model is sparse as heck.

There’s no way the effective batch size is 8, it has to be waaay higher than that.

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[–] Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 5 days ago (2 children)
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