How much water does it take to ask ChatGPT a question?

[thewayne]

You may remember a few months ago I posted a link to an article about a new AI supercomputer that consumed an insane amount of electricity, enough to power something on the order of 3,000 to 30,000 houses?

As you may suspect, consuming that amount of electricity requires A LOT of cooling. OpenAI has a datacenter that pulls from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa. Iowa. You know, cornfields. Breadbasket of America. I'd love to know how much water - precisely - they are pulling.

A researcher at UC Riverside "...estimates ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water (close to what's in a 16-ounce water bottle) every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions...

Google reported a 20% growth in water use in the same period, which Ren also largely attributes to its AI work.

OpenAI and Microsoft both said they were working on improving "efficiencies" of their AI model-training."

https://apnews.com/article/chatgpt-gpt4-iowa-ai-water-consumption-microsoft-f551fde98083d17a7e8d904f8be822c4

https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/09/10/2033253/to-build-their-ai-tech-microsoft-and-google-are-using-a-lot-of-water

Comments

[dewline]

Yeah, I'm not sure that we need ChatGPT right now. Or Midjourney either.

[motodraconis]

As well as bitcoin burning down the world, now this. It's obscene.

[thewayne]

Yep.

[warriorsavant]

Did you use ChatGPT to do this research? Asking for a friend.

[thewayne]

ROFL.  No.

[disneydream06]

And of course you have water to spare on this planet.
UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[silveradept]

All that water usage for cooling heat. In a space that is increasingly suffering from droughts and other situations where there isn't enough water already. Seems like the sort of thing where the companies that want to pursue this kind of electrical consumption and water usage have to find ways of supplying themselves on their own, and efficiently recycling it.

Or maybe they could recognize that trying to throw that kind of raw computing power at something probably means they haven't learned enough about it to do anything useful with it.

[thewayne]

According to some comments that I read, the water in the cooling towers has SULFURIC ACID mixed in!  I don't understand the concept behind it, I need to talk to my next-door neighbor about that, he's a college instructor on water ecology and such and may have some insight.  That would definitely add to the difficulty of recovering that water and reusing it!  I think Iowa got suckered with the prospect of economic investment, not knowing what the water demand of the project would be.

[silveradept]

Doped water probably increases its heat-carrying capacity and raises the boiling point, would be my guess. And it certainly does make that water less reclaimable.

The article talks about all the things they're doing to try and mitigate the water draw, but Microsoft probably dangled the prospect of jobs in front of them and that was too much to resist.