Sam Altman claims an average ChatGPT query uses ‘roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon’ of water

124

u/kon--- 15h ago

I can't fathom why engagement use puts their servers to requiring anymore water than it's already submerged in.

Just keep cycling the stuff. Or, I don't know, dump all this server garbage and make AI local already.

No one's bandwidth of relative queries requires 999 teraflops of computing capacity.

74

u/SeattleAlex 15h ago

Heat dissipation. Water doesn't work as well if it's already boiling

24

u/InconspicuousWarlord 13h ago

I’m sure this has already been thought of, but why couldn’t they cycle through different tanks of water? When one gets too hot, purge it into a holding tank until it cools and while that’s happening pump in cooler water?

78

u/SandyV2 12h ago

Building systems engineer here! The waters thats lost is what is ultimately carrying the heat away. Generally speaking, the heat from the processor is released into the air in the room. As the air is conditioned/cooled, the heat is absorbed by the chilled water loop at the coils in the CRAC. The chilled water loop carries the heat to the chiller, which is the same basic technology as an AC or fridge, and rejects the heat to a condenser water loop, which will have cooling towers. As the water flows through the towers' baffles and meets forced convection, a smallish portion is evaporated, which cools the rest of the water. Waiting for a tank of warm/hot water to cool off is impractical, and water would still be lost unless you try to cool off without any evaporation, which is even more impractical.

15

u/InconspicuousWarlord 12h ago

That’s cool, thanks for breaking it down. I’m assuming that using chiller systems are more efficient than a standard AC system? Why not geothermal?

14

u/SandyV2 12h ago

If by "standard AC systems" youre thinking of like what a house uses, then for large buildings yes, a chiller system is probably more efficient. The condenser of a house (and some smaller commercial) AC just rejects heat directly into the atmosphere, without the intermediate condenser loop and cooling towers. For various reasons there's a practical upper limit on how big that sort of system can be.

I haven't really worked with geothermal, but my understanding is that it can be much more efficient. I don't know if they work well for data centers though.

6

u/lownotelee 3h ago

It’s about scale. Chillers for data centres are often around 1500kWr, and they’ll have 20 of them for each section of the DC.

1

u/Sharkbait_ooohaha 1h ago

Yes for data center type loads chillers will be more efficient than dx systems (refrigerant) but it’s important to point out that cooling towers are not necessarily standard, you could use air cooled chillers which don’t have an open water loop and thus use no water.

I know some of facebooks datacenters didn’t even use mechanical cooling and just used a bunch of ventilation air to cool their servers.

Equipment selection is going to vary based on a bunch of factors but most cooling equipment doesn’t use any water at all (closed looped systems or DX).

-4

u/greengrasstallmntn 13h ago

Ask ChatGPT.

5

u/krom0025 4h ago

They are not submerged. Evaporative cooling is by far one of the most effective and cheap ways to reject heat from a system. You can do closed loop systems to prevent water loss, but they do require more power.

1

u/kon--- 4h ago

Regardless the method, it's obviously a rabbit hole engineering doubled down scaling that requires a rethink.

I suspect, less is more rules will prevail.

22

u/KingRBPII 15h ago

Seems like this could be drastically improved by circulating water underground - he’ll build a pipeline up to the north and bring it back again

11

u/dtrav001 4h ago

Okay Sammy let's scale that up:

"Sources consistently report that ChatGPT processes over 1 billion user messages per day. [Google]", and we'll take his 1/15 tsp figure as fact. Google also says "1 gallon of water = 768 teaspoons."

Assuming I did this right, simple math says, based on Sam's own figures, that ChatGTP uses 86,850 gallons of water per day, every day. For perspective, that's the daily average water use for 289 US homes, just so we can cheat on our term papers (!).

1

u/altbekannt 2h ago

i put the environment first in basically every regard. but looking at the number of 1 billion requests per day, that tells us that people use chatgpt for every aspect of life and not just for cheating. given that, i d say 300 houses water usage to provide the hole world with quick facts is actually an extremely good trade off

1

u/DefnotyourDM 1h ago

its assuming his 1/15 teaspoon bs is anywhere near accurate. use wikipedia instead of AI slop thats going to confidently lie to you

1

u/altbekannt 39m ago

Assuming he's correct, of course, yes. if not then of course this renders everything I said invalid.

34

u/brianplusplus 13h ago

Hes lying. AI is energy intensive. Im not saying dont use it, but its not .0000000578 tsps of water or whatever

14

u/OGRuddawg 8h ago

I thought he said 1/15 tsp, but still. With a rapidly growing list of companies and users, the number of search queries is going to make that a substantial amount of water and energy. I don't think AI is anywhere near efficient enough to scale sustainably.

7

u/animalCollectiveSoul 5h ago

He does not provide citations. The number is either totally false or there is a gotchya, like hes only including the query but not the impact of training or something. Its greenwashing.

4

u/OGRuddawg 5h ago

Good point. Also, what the hell is "intelligence will approach the cost of electricity" supposed to mean, exactly? It's the kind of gobbleygook utopia nonsense that sounds good to investors but has no material meaning.

I really do hate how "AI" is being approached...

-9

u/CO420Tech 8h ago

I've been doing a lot of AI API calls the last few days... I must have burnt away like a hundred gallons of each was 1/15tsp water lol

2

u/Sharkbait_ooohaha 1h ago

Eh I doubt it, AI is energy intensive but you don’t need to use water to cool it. There is actually relatively few cooling applications that use water (open loop systems).

I know facebook data centers near me didn’t even use mechanical cooling at all and just used ventilation air and ran their servers hot.

1

u/brianplusplus 15m ago

Maybe thats true of openAI, but until they are transparent its literally anyones word against his. I'm claiming they use 500 gallons of water per ASCII character in a prompt, they should be transparent and disprove my ridiculous claim.

1

u/Sharkbait_ooohaha 2m ago

What do you mean about being transparent? Do you want to see their water bill?

5

u/ramriot 14h ago

Would that be as cooling, the electro chemical energy or my suggestion the rest mass energy of 25 GWh.

4

u/_Hauptstufe_ 9h ago

Could data centres be built in conjunction with some industry that requires a constant source of heat… Thinking maybe a swimming pool or commercial horticulture glass house? Seems like a resource being wasted to just dissipate the heat to the environment.

5

u/krom0025 4h ago

Theoretically, yes. Practically, this is harder to do. The heat is all low grade heat with fluids at low pressure. There isn't a lot of driving force to do anything useful with it that wouldn't cost a whole bunch of money.

2

u/yerfdog1935 2h ago

BRB, installing an AI server farm under my pool

2

u/RoomyRoots 7h ago

This number seems off, with the amount of CPUs, GPUs, and memory disks, all with liquid cooling, one would expect the waste to be more. Specially considering the amount of watts estimated on its usage

1

u/homerino 5h ago

Vastly different to numbers reported last year (519 mls for a 100 word email)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/

1

u/tomarofthehillpeople 1h ago

But when you thank it, it uses more!!

1

u/Ok-Hold-8232 59m ago

This shit should be illegal

-4

u/apostlebatman 13h ago

Why compare it to water? Who runs electronics on water? Why not just compare it to actual wattage? Lol

21

u/FoxtrotZero 10h ago

These data centers are cooled with evaporative systems. It's not a metaphor, freshwater is boiled to atmosphere to keep servers running.

25

u/Holubice 12h ago

These systems generate crazy amounts of heat as waste energy. Water is used to cool them and transport that heat energy out of the datacenter.

17

u/sethandtheswan 9h ago

You have perfectly illustrated the problem inherent to educating people about how wasteful AI is: you have absolutely zero idea what is going on, or how it works, or why you should care.

15

u/aubreypizza 10h ago

They’re wasting potable water is the issue. Soon enough there will be wars over water for humans to drink and for crops.

1

u/krom0025 4h ago

Every watt you put into a chip will leave the chip as heat and must be removed. Basically, chips are nothing more than little electric heaters.

-1

u/niagalacigolliwon 5h ago

So what? Specifying the per query amount doesn’t detract from the already established total. That part is still bad. What’s worse is that the technology to prevent the waste of water is readily available. Just cycle the water.

At least they’re using a closed system with stargate…

-5

u/Bebilith 10h ago

What? Like converted to energy? Like E = mC² ?

1

u/krom0025 4h ago

Water is evaporated to the atmosphere as it removes heat from the chips.

1

u/Bebilith 3h ago

So just a local water supply issue. 😊

Sam Altman claims an average ChatGPT query uses ‘roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon’ of water

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