Link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/21/sam-altman-would-like-remind-you-that-humans-use-a-lot-of-energy-too/

“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman said. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”

So in his view, the fair comparison is, “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”

train a human

This guy has the same level of empathy as Zuck.

I really wish Sam Altman would treat himself with the dignity and efficiency he wants to treat us with.

The ideology of evil eugenicists didn't die with Hitler, and they didn't die with Epstein either.

Idk maybe we should do something about this man.

Except the energy AI is using should also calculate the amount of time and energy used to create all the plagiarized works in its memory banks to make a better comparison.

they do, especially the billionaire ones

do it

I really hope that we can have a revolution and get rid of these cunts.

Unsurprising the man who needed AI to tell him how to care for his child sees less value in "training" humans vs training and running AI.

I’ll get this one if you take Thiel

That's not the flex you think it is, Altman.

Silicon valley was a huge source of revenue for America... And when you have one industry, or a bunch of individuals making all the money - it risks authoritarianism capture of democracy.

So in his view, the fair comparison is, “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”

How about we do a life-cycle assessment instead.

Don't forget the energy needed to produce the humans who:

• Produced research leading to the creation of LLMs.
• Figured out how to design the GPUs that AI run on.
• Extracted the raw materials for the chips.
• Processed the materials into products.
• Transported the materials and products.
• Installed the GPUs in datacenters.
• Built the datacenters.
• Operate the civil infrastructure providing power and water to the datacenters.
• Planned and designed that civil infrastructure.
• Congregated into a single area to create the town/city where that infrastructure was planned.
• Birthed that population of people.
• Etc.

Hint: It's the same cumulative energy that his own stupid argument is hinged on.

He acknowledges that people use a lot of energy, yet he's among those who have turned into a blubbering crybaby about falling birth rates.

Isn’t the key thing here the idea that economics, machinery etc are there to serve or support humans? It seems that the rich and the Techbros are of the opposite opinion.

I had to rub my temples for like a minute or two after reading this. Fuck. This is a dumb time line.

We got to start throwing these people in a volcano I tell you. I mean our species survival depends on it.

Just compare a single human life to what He can do

Y'know what uses the most resources, Sammy?

BILLIONAIRES!

Machines have taken a commanding lead over humans when it comes to pretending that they give a shit about what Sam Altman thinks. They can have this one.

You can feel that this guy is not actually a human being inside. At least I can see that its just a surface.

Im very interested in how that happens. Is it souls being born into this existence that are not from the same source as ordinary humans, or what has happened here. Its interesting.

Its like the soul has been replaced by the mind, and the mind wants humans to be machines.

Where did you get that idea ? Everything is here to generate profits for investors, nothing else

Then he can spread that energy usage out over 20 years, so not to burdent the infrastructure and drive up prices for everyone. That way he needs a much smaller data canter too.

A human might be using something like 300 times more energy, generating the same number of tokens. But those tokens are higher quality. The LLM will be generating much more text for the prompter, than a human assistant would, for the result to be useful.
The LLM will also be issued allot of low value prompts, driving up it's over all cost of operation. I've seen people use it instead of a calculator. It's also generating useless text with every google search.

Worth noting that humans deriving energy from food, are orders of magnitude more efficient than a server deriving it's energy from coal/gas/nuclear power. Poweline transmission losses alone probably make up the difference between human and LLM.

Unless he can make LLMs run on brains in jars, powered by sugar, we are comparing apples and potatoes here.

Your soul is keeping you anchored in real human existence. You have to drop parts of it if overboard to rise up into the spheres of power and privilege. And those with the least soul left rise all the way to the top.

It's the end of an era, the last hurrah where things are taken to the extreme.

I suppose it has been that way ever since farmers created a surplus that businessmen and politicians could steal.

MBAs became too powerful in organizations making decisions about technology they don't understand in conjunction with shareholders/investors pumping money into hype because they don't understand how deliverables in tech works. When will OpenAI actually deliver ?

The humans still exist and need food, even if they are replaced by chatbots in the workforce.
The comparison is therefore useless, unless you plan to murder the unemployed.

If anything i think the better comparison is you use more power watching TV or gaming than you probably will using AI in the day if you do either of those 2 things.

The issue is training takes a lot of power, and because we can't run the hardware locally our usage is also placed in these data centers which put pressure on a specific area instead of distributing the same power usage.

I saw a post a couple days ago about a company etching the model weights into silicon chip and they made a 8b model that could do 16k t/s and once made are relatively cheap to produce, and in power requirements, and would only get better. Just need to make sure they can be recycled well as they'd end up on a 1 to 2 year cycle like phones. Model to chip in 60 days they said.

So maybe that's the future solution to distrubuted usage, but we would still need to solve training, but we could just mandate these datacenters must build their own renewable power and it would be less is everyone could run their own local inference.

This man is completely bonkers! Arguing it's OK to feed the machine with limited resources over a human!
Damned those American oligarchs are batshit crazy sociopaths.

I mean that's the cynical view largely based on how conditions in mainly one particular country have developed sure, but it's not philosophically what economics is about (which is allocating resources in a utility maximising way)

...we should eat them.

A French tool designed by Joseph Guillotin should suffice.

I wonder why nobody has Mangione'd those filthy millionaires yet.

Now I'm hungry

Any of those man-eating predators still around?

A modest proposal

He’s right; he’s wasting energy. He just needs to leave earth.

Train him?

And inventing and refining the computer

Why? He's doing his best to show how absurd our current system is.

Cunt.

Ever notice that Sweaty Sam never makes an actual point

Yeah maybe thats it. Souls who are attracted to this kind of power gives up their humanity, if they even had it in the first place. Would be interesting to know Sam Altman as a child...

but PER QUESTION how many kilowatt hours are they using. not just in their heads, in their hearts and in their booties.

K, by my measurement we don't need to invest more in keeping him alive

Plan is obvious... to me. Why not so to everybody else

The percentage of sociopaths involved with creating a society should never be greater than zero.

Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

Sam, you little piece of shit, the thing is, most humans are cared for because that's what we strive to, not because we want to replace them for fuck's sake.

I made a joke a while ago about "kid being a necessary evil". This dude really is comparing keeping humanity afloat and burning humanity's resource for a computer. I'm pretty sure even his little AI garbage yesman would "disagree".