Milja Moss - July 2024
Sources used:
Here, I'm putting together various sources to properly contextualize how much energy and water you actually spend when using services like ChatGPT. This is not a rigorous analysis; while I've based my numbers on the above sources as much as I could, I've also introduced wiggle room by having to make some educated guesses.
This analysis addresses the claims of "AI uses a bottle of water every time you prompt it."
On average, depending on the weather conditions and operational settings, datacenters can evaporate about 1 – 9 liters per kWh of server energy (about 1 L/kWh for Google’s annualized global number and 9 L/kWh for a large commercial data center during the summer in Arizona). [1]
On the other hand, Microsoft claims that their US datacenters use only around 0.5 liters of water per kWh for cooling on average [2]. Different corporations report different numbers for their datacenters, so this is a bit tricky to put a definite number on. I've chosen to double the reported 0.5 liter figure given by Microsoft for my calculations here because OpenAI's datacenters were funded by Microsoft, and I'm leaving some generous margin for error.
It should be understood that when datacenters take in water, they don't spit it out as toxic radioactive sludge. Cooling towers are, in the most simple terms, giant buckets of water. Heat is pumped into these buckets from inside the datacenter, transfering the heat to the water. As the hot water evaporates, it releases the heat into the environment. New water is then added in to continually replace the lost water. The evaporated water enters the water cycle, and rains back down somewhere else.
What the paper is concerned about is disruption to local ecosystems and water availability. If datacenters in one location grow too big, they risk evaporating too much water, drying up the local freshwater sources. The same goes for all manner of datacenters and industrial water use regardless of application, of course.
Cooling towers have other environmental impacts outside the scope of this analysis. Namely, the water in cooling towers is treated to prevent microbial and fungal growth, as well as prevent corrosion and other unwanted damage to the cooling infrastructure. If this treated water is dumped back into the environment without proper recycling, these chemicals will cause environmental harm.
This is another important point to realize. The "bottle of water for each response" claims originate from this line:
GPT-3 needs to “drink” (i.e., consume) a 500ml bottle of water for roughly 10-50 responses, depending on when and where it is deployed [1]
And this figure considers both "scope 1" as well as "scope 2" water usage. Scope 1 means the water used for cooling directly, as described above. Scope 2 means water used for generating the energy itself. That means water used by the power plants that supply the datacenter is also taken into account.
The national weighted average for thermoelectric and hydroelectric water use is 2.0 gal (7.6 L) of evaporated water per kWh of electricity consumed at the point of end use [3]
This means that ALL electricity usage, across the United States, spends 7.6 liters of water per one kilowatt-hour.
To put this into perspective, these activities spend more or less 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity:
Each time you do one of these things, you use 7.6 liters of water (on average across the entire US).
The official estimate shows that GPT-3 consumes on the order of 0.4kWh electricity to generate 100 pages of content (e.g., 0.004kWh per page) [1]
This refers to the "Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners" paper:
with the full GPT-3 175B, generating 100 pages of content from a trained model can cost on the order of 0.4 kW-hr [4]
Note two things here:
It is not clear how many tokens a "page" is worth, the paper does not define what a page is. I'm going to assume they mean a standard page in a book, which is around 500 tokens. This corresponds to 1-3 responses from ChatGPT, depending on context. The following results are somewhat fuzzy given there are no concrete numbers available.
Based on this I'll estimate that, given a 175B parameter chat model, one 300-token response will consume around 2.5 watt-hours. The current distilled "turbo" models for both ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 are almost certainly smaller than this, at least for 3.5. But we'll stick with the 2.5 watt-hour figure per response for now.
With our 1 liter per kWh estimated for cooling, 2.5 watt-hours neatly corresponds to 2.5 milliliters of cooling water evaporated per request. If we take into account the water spent on electricity as well, the number jumps to 21.5 milliliters of water per request. This figure is in line with the paper's "GPT-3 needs to 'drink' a 500ml bottle of water for roughly 10-50 responses" [1], allowing us 24 responses for 500 ml of water use.
As I said, the current production models (at least for GPT-3.5-Turbo) are smaller than 175 billion parameters. A wild guess for 3.5-turbo, given its performance compared to open source models, is in the ballpark of 30-50 billion parameters. So odds are that ChatGPT-3.5 gets you around 100 responses per 500ml of water.
In summary:
When determining whether you should be using services like ChatGPT, the question then becomes: "Are 1600 responses from ChatGPT as useful to me as 2 hours of video games?"
(For posing the same question about GPT-4o, you should use the numbers for GPT-3-175B as a guideline. There is no confirmed information for the size of GPT-4o; rumors say it is a mix of 200 billion parameter models, where the most fitting model is chosen on a per-task basis. This would make it more or less equivalent to the original GPT-3 model in terms of power use.)