The Download: AI’s energy future

Three big things we still don’t know about AI’s energy burden

—James O’Donnell

Earlier this year, when my colleague Casey Crownhart and I spent six months researching the climate and energy burden of AI, we came to see one number in particular as our white whale: how much energy the leading AI models, like ChatGPT or Gemini, use up when generating a single response. 

We pestered Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft, but each company refused to provide its figure for our article. But then this…