Comment by moozilla

The link the article uses to source the 60 GWh claim (1) appears to be broken, but all of the other sources I found give similar numbers, for example (2) which gives 50 GWh. This is specifically to train GPT-4, GPT-3 was estimated to have taken 1,287 MWh in (3), so the 50 GWh number seems reasonable.

I couldn't find any great sources for the 200 plane flights number (and as you point out the article doesn't source this either), but I asked o1 to crunch the numbers (4) and it came up with a similar figure (50-300 flights depending on the size of the plane). I was curious if the numbers would be different if you considered emissions instead of directly converting jet fuel energy to watt hours, but the end result was basically the same.

[1] https://www.numenta.com/blog/2023/08/10/ai-is-harming-our-pl...

[2] https://www.ri.se/en/news/blog/generative-ai-does-not-run-on...

[3] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-hidden-cost-...

[4] https://chatgpt.com/share/678b6178-d0e4-800d-a12b-c319e324d2...