ChatGPT now handles 2.5 billion prompts daily, OpenAI confirms

Recap: Generative AI and enormous language fashions proceed to achieve reputation amongst people and corporations regardless of mounting analysis that questions the know-how’s usefulness. As AI investments increase, climbing every day utilization statistics will doubtless intensify scrutiny of the environmental impression.

OpenAI just lately told Axios that its in style generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, receives over 2.5 billion prompts per day globally. Of these, over 330 million, or round 13 %, come from the US.

With out offering actual numbers, the corporate additionally confirmed that almost all of its over 500 million weekly energetic customers make the most of the free model. Bloomberg beforehand reported that ChatGPT has roughly 3 million paying customers, a 50 % improve from earlier this yr.

The numbers might draw extra consideration to one of many main criticisms of LLMs: their water and power consumption. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims that ChatGPT prompts use roughly 0.34 watt-hours and round 0.32 milliliters of water, or one-fifteenth of a teaspoon on common. Nonetheless, latest analysis means that the true determine might differ wildly relying on the LLM used.

Researchers from the colleges of Rhode Island and Tunis estimate that GPT-4o, the default mannequin free of charge ChatGPT customers, is without doubt one of the most effective, utilizing between 1ml and 2ml per immediate. Nonetheless, different variants of GPT-4 can eat between 0.1ml (GPT-4.1 nano) and 30ml (GPT-4.5).

Primarily based on Altman’s estimate, 2.5 billion prompts per day would possibly eat roughly 212,500 gallons of water, or over 77 million gallons, yearly. Nonetheless, researchers consider GPT-4o’s yearly water footprint may very well be a number of instances greater. Cooling-water and infrastructural water utilization for the LLM’s knowledge facilities would possibly completely take away a minimum of 352 million gallons of freshwater from native ecosystems by the tip of 2025, or sufficient consuming water for 1.2 million folks. ChatGPT will even doubtless eat thousands and thousands to billions of watt-hours this yr, roughly equal to the utilization of hundreds of households.

Because the know-how’s urge for food and recognition develop, so do doubts over its future. LLM utilization is becoming endemic in greater schooling, accelerating in courtrooms, and turning into necessary at some firms. Yahoo Japan expects AI utilization to double productiveness by 2028, however a number of experiences point out that the know-how really slows employees down.

Microsoft lower 9,000 jobs to offset an $80 billion AI funding. The know-how additionally just lately made Nvidia the world’s first $4 trillion firm. Nonetheless, a high economist warns that it has created a bigger repeat of the 2000 dot-com bubble. The S&P 500 might have grow to be dangerously depending on large AI bets from a number of firms, and EZPR’s Ed Zitron just lately outlined how the sector’s progress principally stems from gross sales of Nvidia knowledge middle GPUs. The chipmaker may need grow to be a single level of failure for an business that has but to display vital profitability.