Andy Masley
speaker
209 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 12 Dec
Andy Masley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Like one is just so much worse than the other.
And so a part of this is also motivated by just worrying that a lot of the environmental conversation about this stuff is a little bit off base and people are losing track of the big picture and like where the actual bad guys are.
Yeah, a lot to say.
So most importantly, there's this common wisdom floating around that I think is pretty conclusively wrong, which is the idea that an individual chatbot prompt uses an entire bottle of water.
This is based on a misreading of a Washington Post article, which itself I thought was pretty strange, where the article implied that
writing a single email with ChatGPT uses a whole bottle of water.
And for that to be true, the article seems to assume, among other things, that you're sending like 10 to 20 ChatGPT prompts to write this 100-word email.
Like, I'm a power user of chatbots myself, but I don't use them that much.
It's also assuming a lot...
Like a lot of the water that it considers is actually in like offsite lakes dammed by hydroelectric plants.
And it's considering the water evaporated on those lakes by the sun.
And then even there after that, it's also assuming that these models are not any more efficient than they were in like the year 2020 specifically.
So I would really like that talking point to go away.
Basically, like that's just a horrible misreading of a kind of like inconclusive article.
Our best current data on this, I think, comes from Google.
which seems to imply that the on-site, like in a data center, water cost of a chatbot prompt is about 0.26 milliliters.
And if you add the off-site cost, like the water cost of generating the electricity, that might rise to like two milliliters or something.
And obviously, like there's a range of uncertainty and different prompts use different amounts.
But I want to be able to at least start by saying like, well, let's look at the median prompt.
And so like putting that number in context,
Showing 21–40 of 209 · page 2 of 11
← Previous
Next →