Sam Altman found an unusual argument in defense of AI energy costs.
In response to criticism that neural networks consume too much electricity, the OpenAI CEO suggested comparing these costs to training a human.
His logic goes like this:
Growing a human intellect takes 20 years of life, tons of consumed food, an education system, infrastructure, and thousands of years of evolution.
So comparing the massive costs of AI training to the energy a human spends on a single answer is unfair. Altman believes we should compare an already-trained model with the human brain at the moment of performing the same task. And here, in his opinion, AI can already surpass us in energy efficiency per request.
Interestingly, how did OpenAI employees themselves react to these words. They're energy-intensive people, they eat a lot — under this digital eugenics logic, politicians should optimize them first.