Illustration: BestBrokersChatGPT er en kolossal energisluger
Firmaet BestBrokers har analyseret effektforbruget i forbindelse med brugen af den tekstgenererende AI chatbot ChatGPT. Resultatet er på mange måder særdeles opsigtsvækkende (in english).
Nearly two years have passed since OpenAI launched its groundbreaking text-generating AI chatbot ChatGPT, which quickly became the fastest-growing consumer internet app in history, hitting an estimated 100 million monthly users within just two months.
Beyond answering basic questions, this powerful tool can compose entire essays in seconds, engage in human-like conversations, solve complex math problems, translate texts, and even write code. However, ChatGPT consumes a lot of energy in the process, reportedly nearly ten times more than traditional Google searches.
With this in mind, the team at BestBrokers decided to put into perspective the considerable amount of electric power OpenAI’s chatbot uses for responding to prompts on a yearly basis.
BestBrokers calculated ChatGPT's total power consumption just to produce answers to questions over the course of a year. The company found that OpenAI's chatbot uses approximately 226.82 million kilowatt-hours annually to process over 78 billion user prompts.
This estimate is based on 100 million weekly active users each making around 15 requests per week. According to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), each query to ChatGPT consumes about 2.9 watt-hours of electricity, up to ten times more than the 0.3 watt-hours used by a traditional Google search.
To provide some context, the energy consumption of ChatGPT for generating responses over a year is more than the annual electricity usage of twelve small countries and territories, including Gibraltar, which uses around 200 million kilowatt-hours each year as per the latest EIA data.
In fact, the annual electricity used by ChatGPT for handling user queries is enough to power Gibraltar for approximately 1 year and 49 days, according to our calculations. It is also equivalent to the electricity needed by Switzerland for about a day and a half.
Key takeaways from the BestBrokers report:
- Montenegro and Malta each consume around 3 billion kWh of electricity per year. Remarkably, the annual energy used by ChatGPT to handle user requests could power either of these countries for nearly a month.
- In Iceland, where the yearly electricity consumption is roughly 19 billion kWh, ChatGPT's annual energy usage to generate responses could sustain the country's electrical needs for around 4 days and 9 hours.
- For nations with higher energy demands like Ireland and Serbia, each consuming approximately 31 billion kWh annually, the energy ChatGPT uses in a year just to answer questions could keep their power running for 2 days and 16 hours.
- Even energy-intensive countries such as Greece, Romania, and Portugal, where annual consumption ranges between 47 and 50 billion kWh, could stay powered for roughly 40 hours on ChatGPT's yearly energy usage for responding to prompts.
- Switzerland, which uses 57 billion kWh per year, would be able to run on the ChatGPT's energy usage of 226.82 million kWh for almost a day and a half. Meanwhile, in Finland and Belgium, with their annual usage of around 80 billion kWh, the same amount of energy would last for only a day.
- In the United Kingdom (287 billion kWh/year) and Italy (298 billion kWh/year), the energy ChatGPT uses annually to handle user requests could keep the lights on for about 7 hours. For more energy-intensive countries like France (426 billion kWh/year) or Germany (507 billion kWh/year), that same amount of energy would provide electricity for up to 5 hours.
- Additionally, the energy ChatGPT uses to process user queries in just one hour (25,893 kWh) is equivalent to the energy required to stream video for 137,728 hours in Europe, based on the 2020 European average of 188 Wh per hour of streaming.
In the full report here, you'll find detailed calculations, sources, and the complete methodology behind these findings.
