- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or it will gate keep them from poor people. It will mean alot if the capabilities keep on improving.
That being said, open source models will be a thing always, and I think with that in mind, it will not go away, unless it’s replaced with something better.
I don’t think they can survive if they gatekeep and make it unaffordable to most people. There’s just not enough demand or revenue that can be generated from rich people asking for chatGPT to do their homework or pretend to be their friend. They need mass adoption to survive, which is why they’re trying to keep it artificially cheap in the first place.
Why do you think they haven’t raised prices yet? They’re trying to make everyone use it and become reliant on it.
And it’s not happening. The technology won’t “go away” per se, but these these expensive AI companies will fail.
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.
Can you give some examples of those technologies? I’d be interested in how many weren’t replaced with something more efficient or convenient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
There were certainly companies that survived, because yes, the idea of websites being interactive rather than informational was huge, but everyone jumped on that bandwagon to build useless shit.
As an example, this is today’s ProductHunt
And yesterday’s was AI, and the day before that it was AI, but most of them are demonstrating little value with high valuations.
LLMs will survive, likely improve into coordinator models that request data from SLMs and connect through MCP, but the investment bubble can’t sustain
Technologies come and go, but often when a worldwide popular one vanishes, it’s because it got replaced with something else.
So lets say we need LLM’s to go away. What should that be? Impossible to answer, I know, but that’s what it would take.
We cant even get rid of Facebook and Twitter.
BUT that being said. LLMs will be 100x more efficient at some point - like any other new technology. We are just not there yet.