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by ben_w 427 days ago
One can also work backwards, to see what kind of compute hardware they think must be needed for the models, or how much they think OpenAI's electricity costs.

100 words is ~133 tokens, so 0.14 kWh/133 tokens is about 1 kWh/kilo-token. If electricity is all from record-cheapest PV at $0.01/kWh, then this limits them to a price floor of $10/mega-token. For more realistic (but still cheap) pricing of $0.05/kWh, that's $50/mega-token. Here's the current price sheet: https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing

To generate a 133-token email in, say, 5 seconds, if it takes 0.14 kWh, is 101 kW. This does not seem like a plausible number (caveat: I don't work in a data centre and what I think isn't plausible may just be wrong): https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.14+kWh+%2F+5+seconds+...