Sam Altman defends AI’s energy toll by saying it also takes a lot to ‘train a human’

Sam Altman defends AI’s energy toll by saying it also takes a lot to ‘train a human’ OpenAI CEO also downplayed concerns about how much water datacenters require at AI summit in India The OpenAI boss, Sam Altman , has tried to ease concerns about how much power is used by artificial intelligence models by comparing it to the amount of energy required by human development. “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told the Indian Express recently while in India for the AI Impact summit. “It takes about 20 years of life – and all the food you consume during that time – before you become smart.” Despite that defense, he said that the public assessment of AI’s energy consumption was “fair”, adding: “We need to move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.” Those remarks come amid growing discussion about the environmental impact of the datacenters required to power AI models – and, more generally, about how the technology’s possible impact on society. Datacenters accounted for about 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency . The organization projects that such consumption will increase about 15% each year from 2024 to 2030, more than four times faster than the growth of electricity consumption from all other sectors. “The demand for new datacenters cannot be met in a sustainable way,” Noman Bashir, a computing and climate impact fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s climate and sustainability consortium, told MIT’s news outlet . “The pace at which companies are building new datacenters means the bulk of the electricity to power them must come from fossil fuel-based power plants.” In December, more than 230 environmental groups called for a moratorium on building datacenters in the US. “The rapid, largely unregulated rise of datacenters to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country ...