One of the major deterrents to the development and advancement of generative AI is a lack of sufficient computing power. That is, aside from the privacy and safety concerns that could potentially contribute to the end of humanity.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently made an appearance at one of AMD's recent artificial intelligence conferences, admitting that AI development will require an exorbitant amount of electricity to power its advances (via LaptopMag).
AMD CEO Lisa Su's keynote at the Advancing AI 2025 conference asked Altman whether the recent and recurrent ChatGPT outages are related to GPU shortages. According to OpenAI's CEO:
"Theoretically, at some points, you can see that a significant fraction of the power on Earth should be spent running AI compute. And maybe we're going to get there."
OpenAI is essentially suffering from a GPU problem. After it launched its new GPT-4o image generator in waves, the company quickly made the executive decision to delay a full rollout of the tool.
GPT-4o's image generation capabilities turned out to be a hit among most users to the extent of adding one million new ChatGPT users in less than one hour, predominantly due to viral Studio Ghibli "inspired" memes that flooded social media earlier this year.
Sam Altman jokingly indicated that the viral Ghibli memes were causing OpenAI's GPUs to "melt", further urging users to dial down their image generations. The executive went on to say that the high demand for its image generator tool prompted OpenAI to do unnatural things to mitigate the issue, including temporarily introducing rate limits, borrowing compute power from its research division, and slowing down the shipment of new features.
In a separate interview, Altman claimed:
"It's not like we have hundreds of thousands of GPUs sitting around just like spinning idly."
OpenAI appears to now have enough GPUs to power its advances, and the company is in a position to better handle demand surges from viral moments, such as the Ghibli memes frenzy.
More recently, Sam Altman revealed that "ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived." However, he revealed that the chatbot uses 0.34 watt-hours, "about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes." He further detailed that the AI tool consumes 0.000085 gallons of water per query.
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