Stanford University employees conducted a study to find out how much electricity was consumed when creating the chat bot ChatGPT and similar virtual assistants.
According to scientists, last year the development of GPT-3 required 1300 megawatt-hours of electricity, during the production of which the amount of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere reached 502 tons, which is equivalent to CO2 emissions from 109 cars operating throughout the year.
The latest version of ChatGPT GPT-4, introduced in 2023, turned out to be much more advanced, so it’s safe to say that it took much more electricity to create it.
In 2022, bitcoin turned out to be the most “dirty” cryptocurrency. During the mining of one coin, the average amount of carbon dioxide emissions was 4.5 tons, that is, the development of GPT-3 required the same amount of electricity as the extraction of 111 bitcoins.
At the same time, the work of the BTC blockchain throughout the year led to the emission of 86.3 million tons of CO2. Obviously, the chatbot’s contribution to atmospheric pollution is negligible.
Nevertheless, Stanford University researchers suggest that in the future, the benefits of using artificial intelligence (AI) will outweigh the harm that virtual assistants will cause to the environment.
In this regard, experts believe that scaling AI-based platforms can carry an environmental risk.
