“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.