I don't have much stake in stopping AI usage vs other ways to reduce emissions, but I watched the video. Sasha did a different paper than the one that article refers to. She doesn't really dispute her numbers, she just says it depends on a lot of factors. She does explicitly say it's a non-negligible amount of water, and in other interviews she asks for transparency from closed source AI providers.

As for the article, it makes a lot of assumptions. At one point they say speed is a marker of energy usage? I think they meant two models with the same speeds but different costs are a good measure for energy usage, but they hadn't mentioned cost up until this point. So this is an odd paragraph.

> GPT-3.5 is widely estimated to be in the ~20B parameter range. GPT-4o is similar in speed to GPT-3.5, which I think is a fair proxy for total power usage (i.e. time spent in GPUs). That’s another 10x improvement right out of the gate.

Regardless, I would disagree.

- Different hardware will use different amounts of energy for the same speed. We don't know anything about the hardware our sessions are run on except what they have told us. - Just because the cost is cheaper doesn't mean it uses less energy. There's reason to think they are offering a deal to pull users in and burning cash on energy, though I'd agree it's not the full 10x.[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fr0zlg/openai_...