Yahoo Finance reports:

Artificial intelligence is expected to have the most impact on practically everything since the advent of the internet. Wall Street sure thinks so. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 26% year to date thanks to the frenzy over AI-related stocks.

But AI’s big breakout comes at a cost: much more energy.

Take for example OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. Research done at the University of Washington shows that hundreds of millions of queries on ChatGPT can cost around 1 gigawatt-hour a day, or the equivalent energy consumed by 33,000 US households.

“The energy consumption of something like ChatGPT inquiry compared to some inquiry on your email, for example, is going to be probably 10 to 100 times more power hungry,” Professor of electrical and computer engineering Sajjad Moazeni told Yahoo Finance.

Industry participants say this is only the very beginning of what’s to come.

“We’re maybe at 1% of where the AI adoption will be in the next two to three years,” said Arijit Sengupta, founder and CEO of Aible, an enterprise AI solution company. “The world is actually headed for a really bad energy crisis because of AI unless we fix a few things.” [Continue reading…]