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by kingstnap 372 days ago
> Altman did not offer any evidence for these claims and failed to mention where his data comes from.

Presumably, as CEO, he is a first-party source.

Also, I mean, water usage is relative. How much water does a person who chats all day use compared to someone who eats a burger every day?

Electricity is also relatively clean as a power source. We would technically all be much greener if we sat naked in shoebox apartments all day playing video games, streaming videos, and chatting with AI instead of doing actually resource-intensive things like flying around and manufacturing.
2 comments
tecleandor 372 days ago
He's not a first-party source about energy or water use, he's not the utilities provider (except for certain small percentage, like the dirty gas turbines they're buying, I guess).

He could easily have said: "In our XXX data center we spend xxxx kWh a month, xxx cubic meters of water go in, xxx go out, we do XXX billions of tokens, so x cost per token." Then people can say if he's missing information or he's not taking certain factors in consideration.

"their essay for them requires 0.000085 gallons of water" means nothing. What's an essay? How big? What model is it using? What are you considering for the water consumption?

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hansmayer 372 days ago
> Presumably, as CEO, he is a first-party source.

So you're suggesting we should blindly trust him? Whereas everyone else would need to bring in the data, to you know, actually substantiate the claims ?

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kingstnap 372 days ago
Being a first-party source and reliability are orthogonal concepts. But yes, he doesn't need to bring receipts; he is the receipt.

He can take the number of queries they ran and divide it by the amount of electricity they bought. Or maybe his dashboard already shows energy cost per query.

His source is obviously knowing the actual figure. The arXiv paper needs to justify its guesswork.

The reliability can be increased by getting an independent audit. But an audit doesn't change the source being Sam himself.

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JimDabell 372 days ago
Their reason for claiming he’s lying appears to be based upon external estimates about GPT-3 from years ago. Yes, it’s entirely reasonable to believe Altman over them.
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hansmayer 372 days ago
I don't think that's the only reason, and it's not the only time he gave out some, mildly put, unverified information.
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