CEO Sam Altman described criticisms regarding the power consumption of generative AI models as "unfair" during an AI summit held in India. In response to a reporter's question, he countered by stating that raising a human requires 20 years of food and a long history of evolution. Altman asserted that the energy required for ChatGPT to provide an answer after the model has been trained is efficient compared to that of a human.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Discusses Energy Efficiency Comparison Between AI and Humans
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On the other hand, it has been pointed out that the energy the brain uses for simple queries is less than that of frontier models. Some views suggest that the true concern regarding AI is not the volume of resources, but its contribution to climate change. OpenAI's Stargate data center utilizes combustion turbines, such as the gas generators installed by the company.
It is noted that Altman compared AI and humans from an equivalent standpoint. At the same summit, he stated that superintelligence would arrive within a few years. Dario Amodei, CEO of competitor Anthropic, has also used similar metaphors, likening AI training to human evolution and learning.
Anthropic is researching whether its chatbot, Claude, possesses consciousness or feels "pain." They have also introduced a mechanism to terminate conversations in harmful dialogues to consider the welfare of the model. AI companies may either believe their products are equivalent to humans or consider such a narrative to be effective marketing.
Source: Sam Altman Is Losing His Grip on Humanity (HN 80pt, 109 comments) (HN Search (backfill), 2026-02-24)