Internet slams Sam Altman over his 'reminder' to everyone that humans use a lot of ...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has triggered a debate on social media after he appeared to dismiss concerns about AI’s environmental impact by comparing the energy used in training of software to the amount consumed by biological development of human beings. Speaking at the Express Adda event during the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Altman pushed back against the narrative that AI is an ecological disaster, suggesting that the focus on the energy used to train models like GPT-4 is ‘unfair’ when compared to the resources required to raise a human being.

“We used to do evaporative cooling in data centres, but now that we don't do that. You see these like things on the internet where ‘don't use ChatGPT, it's 17 gallons of water for each query’ or whatever… This is completely untrue. Totally insane. No connection to reality,” Altman said.




“What is fair though is the energy consumption, not per query, but in total because the world is now using so much AI is real and we need to move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly,” he added.

Sam Altman says ‘20 years of food’ to make a human smart

Altman suggested that if critics want to count the energy used to “train” an AI, they should apply the same math to people. He emphasised that once a model is trained, the energy cost of a single AI query is likely more efficient than a human answering the same question.

“One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart,” Altman argued.

“And not only that, it took like the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to like figure out science and whatever to produce you and then you took whatever you you know you took. So the fair comparison is if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis measured that way,” he added.

Internet criticises Sam Altman

X user David Fairchild criticised Altman’s analogy as a dehumanising worldview that frames people as costly biological processors.

“He's not just defending AI energy use. He is smuggling in a whole anthropology where humans are basically inefficient meat computers that you have to pour food and years into before they become useful. And once you accept that, the next move is obvious. If people are just costly biological training runs, then burning mountains of electricity to build synthetic intelligence starts to feel not only equal, but superior, even if it negatively impacts actual humans.

That is the dystopian. It makes human development sound like a bug in the system, and it makes sacrificing human and creational flourishing for more computational power sound logical. To him, the grid gets strained, prices go up, ecosystems get hit, but hey, humans eat too, so what's the difference?

The difference is that humans aren't an inefficient line item. They're the point. If your worldview can look at a child growing into an adult and describe it as energy spent to train intelligence, you haven't said something profound. You've revealed a horrifically rotten worldview.”

Another user said: “I just can’t understand how such a man have so much power and shape our future. This guy should not be leading any company.”