OpenAI Will Not Disclose GPT-5’s Energy Use. It Could be Higher Than Past Models
upstart writes:
In mid-2023, if a user asked OpenAI's ChatGPT for a recipe for artichoke pasta or instructions on how to make a ritual offering to the ancient Canaanite deity Moloch, its response might have taken - very roughly - 2 watt-hours, or about as much electricity as an incandescent bulb consumes in 2 minutes.
OpenAI released a model on Thursday that will underpin the popular chatbot - GPT-5. Ask that version of the AI for an artichoke recipe, and the same amount of pasta-related text could take several times - even 20 times - that amount of energy, experts say.
As it rolled out GPT-5, the company highlighted the model's breakthrough capabilities: its ability to create websites, answer PhD-level science questions, and reason through difficult problems.
But experts who have spent the past years working to benchmark the energy and resource usage of AI models say those new powers come at a cost: a response from GPT-5 may take a significantly larger amount of energy than a response from previous versions of ChatGPT.
OpenAI, like most of its competitors, has released no official information on the power usage of its models since GPT-3, which came out in 2020. Sam Altman, its CEO, tossed out some numbers on ChatGPT's resource consumption on his blog this June. However, these figures, 0.34 watt-hours and 0.000085 gallons of water per query, do not refer to a specific model and have no supporting documentation.
"A more complex model like GPT-5 consumes more power both during training and during inference. It's also targeted at long thinking ... I can safely say that it's going to consume a lot more power than GPT-4," said Rakesh Kumar, a professor at the University of Illinois, currently working on the energy consumption of computation and AI models.
The day GPT-5 was released, researchers at the University of Rhode Island's AI lab found that the model can use up to 40 watt-hours of electricity to generate a medium-length response of about 1,000 tokens, which are the building blocks of text for an AI model and are approximately equivalent to words.
[...] As large as these numbers are, researchers in the field say they align with their broad expectations for GPT-5's energy consumption, given that GPT-5 is believed to be several times larger than OpenAI's previous models. OpenAI has not released the parameter counts - which determine a model's size - for any of its models since GPT-3, which had 175bnparameters.
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