During a recent public appearance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that he wants a large chunk of the world's power grid to help him run artificial intelligence models.
As Laptop Mag flagged, he dropped that bomb dropped during AMD's AI conference last week after Lisa Su, the CEO of the hosting firm who counts Altman as a client and friend, mentioned ChatGPT's recent outages.
Though OpenAI hasn't revealed the exact causes of its massive June outage, there's a good chance it had to do with running out of computing power. This seems all the more probable given that Altman admitted earlier this year that the company had run out of graphics processing units or GPUs, the high-end computer chips that AMD sells and companies like OpenAI use to power their large language models (LLMs).
Speaking to that likelihood, Su asked Altman, "are there ever going to be enough GPUs?"
With a chuckle, the inscrutable executive paused before responding — and then essentially said the quiet part out loud.
"Theoretically, at some points, you can see that a significant fraction of the power on Earth should be spent running AI compute," Altman said. "And maybe we're going to get there."
To reiterate: the CEO of the world's largest AI company said he believes a "significant fraction" of the electricity on this planet should be used to run AI — and said so to the CEO of a company whose GPUs he recently committed to purchasing, too.
Though Su moved on quickly from the exchange, the undercurrent beneath what Altman admitted is, to paraphrase Laptop Mag's Madeline Ricchiuto, low key nightmare fuel.
Perhaps most upsetting about Altman's flippant admission is the environmental impact he so casually ignored. Conventional electric generation often relies on the combustion of fossil fuels, which have been killing our planet since way before OpenAI was a twinkle in Altman's eye.
Add in a new electricity-guzzling industry like AI to a power grid already stretched to the brink, and you've got a serious problem — one that Altman, Su, and everyone else who boosts AI seems to not want to face full-on.
... continue reading