- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
“It also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”
Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/21/sam-altman-would-like-remind-you-that-humans-use-a-lot-of-energy-too/
People are incredibly efficient compared to machines of any kind. You can’t run a machine that long on 2000 calories of energy, which is what enough energy to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree celsius.
Or the food definition is raising a kilogram of water 1 degree celsius, so the food calorie is a calorie*1,000.
Life is way way more efficient than machines, that take a lot of energy, not the least AI that uses like 6x as much or whatever as normal computer operations, last I heard.
Altman is a confidence man, emulating Musk and his ilk, this is who society respects, not people that do anything great, but people who hype stock prices and make people think they will do great things.
Note that dietary calories are kilocalories, so 2,000 calories of food is 2,000,000 calories from a physics standpoint.
This issue goes away if you use the proper SI unit, the joule.
Whilst nothing you say here is wrong, humans have a tendency to want more things than machines. A place to live (perhaps a mansion with its own pool), transportation (maybe a private jet or a million dollar supercar) and other general recreation (such as a datacenter full of GPU’s hallucinating cartoons of scantily clad women). So really, a human is pretty energy intensive when you think about it, compared to their rather low number of working hours (eesh, sleep takes so much time).
Good point.
Let’s turn off Sam to save energy.
Training humans doesn’t destroy the planet, nor the hardware market, nor it raises electric bills for all citizens, nor it concentrates billions in the hands of a few individuals like you are doing with your company and all your brainwashing attempts.
“Now that we don’t do that, you see these things on the internet where, ‘Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query’ or whatever,” Altman said. “This is completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality.”
He knows he’s a con artist, he knows people know he’s a con artist, and yet he’s talking as if we were supposed to trust him to not be a con artist. That’s basically to call everyone stupid/gullible/trash by proxy.
He added that it’s “fair” to be concerned about “the energy consumption — not per query, but in total, because the world is now using so much AI.” In his view, this means the world needs to “move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.”
Even before those huge datacentres, “don’t reduce consumption, increase production” is how we’re cooking the planet.
There’s no legal requirement for tech companies to disclose how much energy and water they use,
That’s something that could be fixed. At least in Europe, China, Japan; probably here in Latin America, too.
Altman also complained that many discussions about ChatGPT’s energy usage are “unfair,” especially when they focus on “how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query.”
Whataboutism at its grossest.
I agree, in order to remain morally consistent we should remove all the most energy-intensive humans as well. Oh look, it’s the billionaires. Well, you guys had a good run, time to get in the pit

What if we used the energy produced by the human body to power AIs?
Why didn’t i take the blue pill…?
We can start by burning Sam Altman’s to generate some electricity, but I still won’t interact with the fucking clankers.
Call me when you can run AI on burritos.
do you eat burritos ? because we can make things that can eat burrito eaters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetically_Autonomous_Tactical_Robot
How would it know? Did it just look at the amount of robot fuel it used in a week and then compare?








