“People are often Openai CEO Sam Altman wrote in an assertion in a lengthy blog post last week. Altman writes that the average query using energy from the 0.34 watt age is “what the oven uses in more than a second, or what the highly efficient light pack uses in minutes.”
For businesses with 800 million active users (and growth) a week, the question of how much energy all of these searches use is becoming increasingly pressing. But experts say that without much more public context from Openai about how this calculation was reached, it doesn't mean much, including what the “average” query is, whether image generation is included, and whether Altman will include additional energy use, such as training AI models or cooling Openai's servers.
As a result, Sasha Lucciioni, who hugged the AI company's face, doesn't have much stock in Altman's numbers. “He could have pulled it out of his ass,” she says. (Openai did not respond to requests for details on how this number was reached.)
As AI takes over our lives, it also promises to transform our energy systems, overcharging our carbon emissions as we try to combat climate change. Now, the newly growing research organization is trying to post hard numbers on which carbon is actually emitted in all of the AI uses.
This effort is complicated by the fact that key players who Openai likes have barely disclosed environmental information. The analyses submitted for peer review by Lucciioni and three other authors this week will require the need for environmental transparency in AI models. In a new analysis by Lucciioni, she and her colleagues used data from OpenRouter, a leaderboard for large-scale language model (LLM) traffic, to find that 84% of LLM usage in May 2025 were models with zero environmental disclosure. In other words, consumers have overwhelmingly chosen models with completely unknown environmental impacts.
“It blows my mind to be able to buy a car and know how many miles I'm spending per gallon, but I use all of these AI tools every day and there's no efficiency metrics, no emissions factors, nothing,” says Lucciioni. “It's not mandatory. It's not a regulation. Given the location of the climate crisis, it should be at the top of the regulatory agenda everywhere.”
As a result of this lack of transparency, Lucciioni says the people are exposed to presumptions that make no sense but are considered gospel. For example, you may have heard that the average ChatGPT request requires 10 times more energy than the average Google search. Lucciioni and her colleagues are John Hennessy, chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, created in 2023, tracking the allegations.
One company's board member (Google) has a claim about the products of another company (Openai) that he has no connection to is tenuous at best. (When I was writing this work, I got the pitch with this exact statistic.)
