Q&A: UW researcher discusses just how much energy ChatGPT uses
Summary
Interview with UW professor Sajjad Moazeni regarding the electricity consumption and data center energy requirements for training and running large language models like ChatGPT.
Key quotes
Overall, this can lead to up to 10 gigawatt-hour (GWh) power consumption to train a single large language model like ChatGPT-3.
This many queries can cost around 1 GWh each day, which is the equivalent of the daily energy consumption for about 33,000 U.S. households.
The article details the computational intensity of LLMs compared to conventional cloud computing. It discusses potential hardware and networking optimizations to reduce data center energy consumption.