👩‍💻 ChatGPT uses less energy than an hour of Netflix

• One hour of Netflix watching equals the energy required for between 300 and 3000 ChatGPT prompts.
• A passenger on a transatlantic flight uses as much energy as 3.5 million ChatGPT prompts.
• Ending your shower one second earlier saves enough water to compensate for 40 ChatGPT prompts.

Everyday comparisons put consumption in perspective

To understand how little energy a ChatGPT prompt actually uses, you can compare it with other common activities. One hour of Netflix watching has the same energy consumption as writing 300 prompts to ChatGPT.

Even more striking is the comparison with air travel. To match the energy consumption of a single transatlantic flight as a passenger, a person would need to write 3.5 million prompts to ChatGPT. That equals 120 prompts every day for 80 years, or one prompt every eight minutes throughout your waking life.

If all Google searches in the world, approximately 8.5 billion per day, were replaced with ChatGPT prompts, it would increase the internet's daily global energy demand by one percent. This can be compared to the actual increase in internet users last year, which was 3.4 percent.

Low water consumption relative to everyday activities

Data also shows that ChatGPT uses minimal water compared to other everyday activities. 300 ChatGPT prompts use about 3.7 liters of water, while one hour of TV watching in an American home consumes about 15 liters.

For a hamburger, approximately 2500 liters of water are used. That equals over 200,000 prompts.

An average shower uses about 9.5 liters of water per minute. Ending your shower just one second earlier therefore saves approximately 0.16 liters of water. Since each ChatGPT prompt uses about 0.004 liters of water in data centers, the water saved by shortening a shower by just one second is enough to compensate for the water consumption of 40 ChatGPT prompts. Shower 12 seconds shorter and you can chat non-stop with ChatGPT for an entire workday.

Significantly reduced energy consumption for AI

Newer analyses from Epoch AI show that a typical ChatGPT prompt with GPT-4o now uses only 0.3 watt-hours of electricity. This is ten times less than previous estimates that indicated 3 watt-hours per prompt. The improvement is primarily due to more efficient models and hardware compared to early 2023.

With this new calculation, the comparison with Netflix becomes even more striking - one hour of Netflix watching now equals the energy for a full 3,000 ChatGPT prompts, which is ten times more than with the older calculations. You could chat non-stop with ChatGPT for over two days, for a single hour of Netflix.

WALL-Y
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