Y ou may be hungry for knowledge, but your chatbot is thirsty for the world’s water supplies. The huge computer clusters powering ChatGPT need four

‘Thirsty’ ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought

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2024-11-23 08:30:04

Y ou may be hungry for knowledge, but your chatbot is thirsty for the world’s water supplies. The huge computer clusters powering ChatGPT need four times as much water to deliver answers than previously thought, it has been claimed.

Using the chatbot for between ten to 50 queries consumes about two litres of water, according to experts from the University of California, Riverside.

A pre-print study from the academics, which was released last year, estimated that one 500ml bottle was used for this volume of queries, but they have now discovered it underestimated the problem.

Technology companies developing powerful artificial intelligence use water for cooling, power generation and in manufacturing chips.

The study, entitled Making AI Less Thirsty, looked at an earlier version of ChatGPT (GPT-3) and will be published in the Communications of the ACM magazine.

Shaolei Ren, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Riverside, said that the original water footprint calculation was based on a figure from OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, in 2020. New figures released in September in a paper by Microsoft showed: “The energy consumption [of GPT-3] will be at least four times as much as the number that we used. This also means the water footprint should be increased four times.”

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