In conversation with artificial intelligence, the same courtesy is often used as in the interpersonal exchange. What is valued in everyday life causes considerable additional costs for systems such as chatt.
Electricity consumption of AI requests
The use of AI systems has a significant impact on the environment. According to a study by the Washington Post and the University of California, around 0.14 kilowatt hours of electricity are required for a request to GPT-4. This corresponds to about 14 LED lamps that run for an hour. Every additional word in one promptly increases the number of tokens to be processed. This leads to more arithmetic, higher power consumption and thus increasing operating costs of the Openai company. The effort arises because each message is completely analyzed and processed by the AI servers, regardless of the content. The systems check with each input whether an answer is expected and which intention is behind it, for example with a simple “request” or “Thank you”.
With millions of users, these small, actually unnecessary inquiries quickly add up at considerable total costs. Openai CEO Sam Altman spoke on the platform X of “tens of million dollars”, which are only due to such courtesy requests.
Tens of Millions of Dollars Well Spent- Yoou Never Know
– Sam Altman (@sama) April 16, 2025
The energy requirement of data centers
Artificial intelligence (AI) requires enormous amounts of electricity and water due to their complex computing processes and infrastructure requirements. Forecasts indicate dramatic development. According to an analysis by the management consultancy McKinsey, the electricity consumption of European data centers could increase to more than 150 terawatt hours by 2030. This would correspond to about five percent of the total European electricity consumption. So far, the growing demand for computing power has been mainly covered by conventional energy sources, which further worsens the climate balance. Companies such as Microsoft and Google are therefore increasingly investing in renewable energies and experimental technologies such as nuclear fusion in order to reduce CO2 emissions in the long term.
Editor finance.net
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