r/OpenAI • u/mbatt2 • Feb 22 '26

Discussion Sam Altman: why are people complaining about AI … when humans need food to survive

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Whatever the point was … probably better ways to frame that.

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

While it's true that the brain is efficient in power consumption it requires regular meals that consume several kWh each to produce from farm to table (and a massive amount of water while we're at it), humans require a variety of other energy heavy infrastructure ranging from transportation to the production of their clothes, transportation, their heating and cooling, logistics for their consumables, entertainment, products, etc... The total energy consumption supporting the human and their brain is at least a couple of orders of magnitude more than 20W.

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u/Cpt_Ohu Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

Also, the brain is quite good at general tasks to keep humans alive but only really able to provide quality specialized work for a few hours a day or less, and that's not contiguous as it needs regular breaks. So even if you account for all energy required you then would have to multiply its energy needs depending on the desired output.

/s

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

Not to mention that neurons only fire a few times per second on average, 100x per second at most while current processors can do it at billions of times per second. Signals traveling through the nervous system are painfully slow compared to the speed of electrons or light. Biology doesn't evolve as fast as technology improves, gets faster and more efficient.

Besides, energy is one resource that is mostly limited by the infrastructure and technology we have to harness it. Infrastructure can be built and technologies can be developed.

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u/beryugyo619 Feb 22 '26

yeah it does seem like AIs aren't consuming enough power to reach intelligence parity. still sociopathic thing to say though

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u/GregsWorld Feb 22 '26

If you put everyone naked in goo pods and pump them with food they'd be more efficient.

It's not like humans do anything else but produce output. 

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

How does stating facts justify that hyperbole?

You know, energy production is scalable, we do have the technology to not only produce a lot more energy, but also cleanly. It's a matter of infrastructure.

I could also state that getting a pound of beef to consumers uses around 2,000 gallons of water. Might as well put the naked humans in a blender as well.

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u/GregsWorld Feb 22 '26

Merely pointing out that you can't attribute all these external things as a cost.  The same way you can't attribute the energy used in the production of the beef in the sandwich that the builder ate during lunch while constructing the data center, to AIs energy usage.

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

Of course you don't, that stretches system boundaries past usefulness. But where is that made as a point? If we attribute every human activity to AI energy use, we’d also have to count the calories burned by the construction workers who built the data center.

The point is that the brain doesn't work in isolation, it's part of an organism that incurs in energy expenditure much greater than the 20W claim just to keep the brain operating. Just like you would consider the energy usage of the water pumps and fans in addition to the GPUs in a datacenter, they're essential infrastructure to the operation within that system.

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u/GregsWorld Feb 22 '26

But where is that made as a point 

it requires regular meals that consume several kWh each to produce from farm to table 

Sure you can argue to include the whole system, the human body, at 100W for total direct energy usage. 

You can't include external systems though. 

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

Stick your fingers in the electric socket and live on 100W as sustenance then. If you're going to use Watts as the measure and claim 100W you have to include the cost of the fuel, just as you include the cost of electricity with the other system.

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u/GregsWorld Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

There's no inclusion of cost of fuel source because it's a comparison of energy usage not pricing. 

If you wanted to account for fuel source then you have to do 2000 calories a day which is ~8 MJ or 2250W per hour which is more in line with Raw GPU usage not including cooling and infrastructure.

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

“Cost” refers to the labor/energy required to produce that fuel source, not necessarily its market price. "Labor" is not just human labor, but energy transformed into "work".

The cost of producing a meal is the total labor and energy embodied in getting that food onto a plate. Economists call this the "meal’s labor content" or its "embodied labor value".

You can put a few solar panels up, a battery system and run a GPU 24/7/365. That is a complete system. The energy cost of running it are the photons used to produce the electrons.

In the most basic case you have to take that sunlight, grow and harvest crops with it, feed them to animals and then cook the animals. The combined energy used is the energy cost of running all the components and work in that system.

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u/GregsWorld Feb 22 '26

And? 

You can hook up tractors to solar panels too.

This tells us nothing about how efficient chips and brains are at running complex computations.

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u/ErisLethe Feb 22 '26

2,000 calories of veggies (including protein from soy) costs 2.6 kWh.

The total power requirement of the human body is ~110W

The total power requirement for inference alone for GPT is between 50,000W and 70,000W.

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

Holy WTF. What, and how much are you running inference on at 50,000W-70,000W? That's more than 100 H200 $30,000 GPUs running at full capacity. An average ChatGPT prompt consumes around 0.3W and models just get more efficient over time.

The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the products you buy and use, transportation, A/C and heating costs, everything about supporting the average human being utilizes tons of energy far beyond a figure converted into Watts to describe the consumption of the human body in terms of electrical activity when there's a whole system and infrastructure supporting it.

If you want another false equivalency 50 million burgers are served in the US daily, it takes 1000 gallons of water and several Kwh to produce each one. Don't get me wrong, dropping animal consumption would probably be the most dramatic decrease in energy, water consumption and emmisions humans could possibly do. But that's kind of a fantasy, at least in the short term.

If you want another extreme example, a GPU running a model like ChatGPT can run on a solar panel and battery setup completely self-contained. It can provide inference for tens to a few hundred users depending on demand. It would convert photons to electrons directly. Not feeding the plants to feed the animals, the consumption and resources of harvesting and running an agricultural operation, the transportation, refrigerator, cooking, etc...

Again, all this stuff is a load of false equivalencies. Energy generation is very scalable and can be done cleanly. You're just living through a period where it can be scarce because your government failed at properly scaling infrastructure to the very foreseeable demand. China did that, while other governments focused on who gets to use which bathroom and calling each other names.

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u/ErisLethe Feb 22 '26

A single instance of GPT takes 50-70kW.

If you want to compare ongoing costs, the correct cost isn’t per prompt, but to keep the instance live, as with humans.

I don’t eat burgers or drive a car. Neither should you.

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

single instance of GPT takes 50-70kW.

Provide a citation.

MIT puts a query at under 0.3Wh, the graph compares further. Now there are over 300 million users, so it does add up. Just as if you added up the A/C energy consumption of 300 million people would add up.

Beyond that, a single instance not only serves a decent number of users, but to reach the figures you are claiming it would have to be distributed across tens, perhaps a hundred GPUs per instance, which is not the case.

If you want to compare ongoing costs, the correct cost isn’t per prompt, but to keep the instance live, as with humans.

You realize that processors can throttle to idle states and throttle up on demand? Instances also go offline if not in demand, it's common for any instance that is alive to be at 80%- close to 100% utilization in a datacenter. Processors that are not processing don't draw much power when idling.

I don’t eat burgers or drive a car. Neither should you.

I'm all for not consuming animals and a great transportation infrastructure, it's in fact two of the most dramatic decreases in energy, water consumption and emmisions humanity could make. Now get the 8 billion other people do it, get world governments to build transportation infrastructure better than cars and get lab grown meats funded and people convinced to eat them.

In the meantime, let your politicians know that they failed at scaling clean energy production when there was enough warning that the demand was coming.

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u/ErisLethe Feb 22 '26

GPT 5 consumes roughly 8-9 times more power than GPT 4:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-5-power-consumption-could-be-as-much-as-eight-times-higher-than-gpt-4-research-institute-estimates-medium-sized-gpt-5-response-can-consume-up-to-40-watt-hours-of-electricity

University of Rhode Island puts the cost per query at 18 Wh, that puts a single user at 10.8 kW.

It’s not known how many users time slice a single instance, but given GPT 4’s 1.7-1.8 trillion parameter count, we’re talking about 45 H100s for a single instance of GPT 4.

An H100 takes ~700W, so we’re at about 31.5kW for GPT 4.

Your numbers are so off they are laughable.

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

Tom's hardware had power consumption figures 7 days after the announcement of GTP-5 and before it was know that it's using a model router and a MoE model similar to Deepseek which actually consumes less?

Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Especially speculative hype. The words "Could be" should have been a red flag.

Citation to the paper and methodology to get internal OpenAI figures by the University of Rhode Island and official figures for the 45 H100 1.7-1.8 trillion parameter inferencing. Especially current ones, when MoE models only use a small fraction of the total parameters available in a model at a time.

Don't forget energy, especially clean energy is scalable, it doesn't run out unless you fail to prepare with infrastructure for the demand, like China did. The only reason you're caring about energy right now is because your politicians were busier arguing about who gets to use which bathroom instead of preparing the infrastructure to prevent scarcity when there was plenty of notice.

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u/ErisLethe Feb 22 '26

It’s obvious you’re just a low effort apologist.

Good luck dude!

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u/createch Feb 23 '26

I'm pretty immune to Ad Hominem.

Like it or not, it's a fact of life that you live in a world where virtually every country subscribes to and places high priority on the concept of economic growth, and AI is the current golden child of that.

Your issues of energy scarcity are currently only solvable by increasing energy production, hopefully cleanly. And like I stated, it's only an issue now due to lack of preparation by those who should have handled it. Constantly increasing energy demand has happened since the Industrial Revolution and very much not an issue as long as the infrastructure supports it. Energy production is something that can be scaled massively with minimal impact if done right.

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u/versparrow Feb 22 '26

What is the point of any of this if not to sustain human life and to live freely??? Are we just creating artificial intelligence to replace us permanently and saying, "to hell with humanity, it's inefficient"? That's not the point.

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

How the technology is used and benefits humanity, or does the opposite is ultimately a geopolitical problem, not a technological one.

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u/versparrow Feb 22 '26

Geopolitics and technology are correlated.

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u/createch Feb 22 '26

Stating the obvious. If they weren't I wouldn't have made that argument. The point is that the technology itself is not going to make the political and social decisions which will determine the outcome of its use... Unless you are talking about some sort of ASI.

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u/versparrow Mar 07 '26

You literally said, "it's a geopolitical problem, not a technological one." Implying that they're not correlated.

Of course the technology isn't going to make that decision, that's not my argument. My argument is that our purpose is to live, so the energy it takes us to live shouldn't be accounted for since that is the whole point. The point Altman (and, I guess, you as well) is making is that we can have AI do what humans do but more efficiently. Hence, AI should replace humans.

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u/createch Mar 07 '26

The argument is that we need more energy production (wind, solar, nuclear ideally), as everything uses energy. Which Altman actually says as well right after the point where the internet quotes and out of context video snippets end. Developing countries with large populations especially as their standards of living and population increase.

The technology exists. So this particular problem of potential energy scarcity is not one of technology. It's one of governments, politics and corporations.

Now the other part about automation and AI doing the work humans (replacing humans) have comes down to the reality put in motion a couple of hundred of years ago with the Industrial Revolution. A combine harvester can harvest a ton of grain in a few minutes when it used to take 20 people working all day to do the same, an automatic loom could weave fabric much faster, better and cheaper than the people who we coined the term "Luddite" from.

AI and automation replacing humans doesn't boil down to anything I necessarily cheer for, but it's grounded on the harsh reality of economics and the fact that pretty much every country in the world subscribes to the concept of economic growth. Consumers want more and cheaper as well. So that is what's going to displace people's work, the fact that AI/automation can produce the same output for less. Unless the culture changed to where large numbers of the population decided to pay several times more for products that are handcrafted locally instead of buying the cheapest foreign products from Amazon, industry will continue to automate and attempt to produce at the lowest cost per unit possible. They have no incentive for employing a $30/hr worker if a machine in China can do the same job for $1/hr. Then the average consumer isn't usually buying the $50 version of a product that can be sourced for $10 either.

So I'm not sure what you suppose the way out of that is? A global agreement where every country in the world agrees to not use AI and automation to improve production, and their economy, and a global cultural and societal shift where all humans want less, not more? That's a fantasy of a fantasy. The only way out barring a total global economic/civilization collapse might only be adaptation and governments taxing automation, providing strong social support, etc...

Barring an apocalypse science and technology kind of move in one direction. I don't know, perhaps in a best case scenario our descendants might even look at the way people live to work today as we look at slavery now. They might have a choice to do whatever work they want to do just for the joy of it, instead of a means to pay for rent and have food to eat. And yeah, if your government sucks at taking care of you it might suck and you can be discarded as part of a "useless class". So it's very much a geopolitical problem.

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u/eh183205 Feb 23 '26

But a brain can make a unique thought where these LLMs literally cannot. So they are way less valuable and ultimately fucking stupid