Artificial intelligence is the latest innovation that is gaining increasing interest among citizens.

One of the most popular applications is ChatGPT from the company OpenAI.

The activity that someone performs online is not free from contamination as many people think. Using email incurs cloud storage costs and also consumes a certain amount of electrical energy.

What is ChatGPT and how is artificial intelligence already impacting the world today?

Many environmentalists have made visible the energy consumption that can go unnoticed and that this also calls for everyone’s attention to reduce the environmental impact of technology.

The National Electricity Company of Spain (Endesa) He explained that ChatGPT and other applications are not exempt from causing an impact on the environment due to their operation at the energy level, as they do not generate gas emissions.

Making these applications work requires programming and training. A statistic from the Spanish Engineering Institute estimated that 78,437 kWh of electricity was needed to train that model.

In Ecuador, the average monthly energy consumption is estimated to be 311.94 kWh/customer. This means that at least 250 clients (homes) can be supported by that energy.

The electricity company also indicated that 700,000 liters of clean drinking water were needed for the training of this tool.

“ChatGPT requires drinking (the equivalent of) a half-liter bottle of water for a simple conversation of between 20 and 50 questions and answers,” the researchers note. “While a half-liter bottle may not seem like much, the total combined water footprint is still extremely large, considering the millions of ChatGPT users,” notes Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

The searches performed on the platform also generate energy consumption that is lower than when using the Google search engine.

A study from Riverside and Arlington universities shows that between 20 and 50 questions in the ChatGPT tool use between 0.001 and 0.01 kWh. (JO)