ChatGPT “drinks” a bottle of water for every 100 words: shocking research results

< /p> Using ChatGPT requires a lot of water/benzoix

About a quarter of Americans have used ChatGPT since the chatbot was released in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. And each request requires a certain cost.

Chatbots use a huge amount of energy to answer users' questions. And even just keeping bot servers cool enough in data centers is damaging the environment, writes The Washington Post.

Although the exact load is almost impossible to quantify, journalists of the publication collaborated with researchers from the University of California at Riverside. This was done to understand how much water and energy OpenAI's ChatGPT uses, which uses the GPT-4 language model released in March 2023, to write an average 100-word email.

< p>Each message in ChatGPT passes through a server that performs thousands of calculationsto determine the best words to answer.

During these calculations, servers, usually located in data centers, generate heat. Water supply systems are often used to cool equipment and maintain its performance. According to Shaolei Ren, an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside, water transports heat generated in data centers to cooling towers to help it escape from the building, similar to how the human body uses sweat to cool itself.

According to him, where electricity is cheaper or water is relatively scarce, large units similar to air conditioners are often used to cool warehouses. This means that the amount of water and electricity needed for a particular request can depend on the location of the data center and vary greatly.

Even under ideal conditions, data centers are often the same among the biggest consumers of water in the cities where they are located, say environmentalists. But data centers with electric cooling systems are also a cause for concern as they increase residents' energy bills and burden the power grid.

Research shows that one email per 100 words requires the use of a bottle of water with a volume of 0.5 liters.