Yes it does. It's kind of a fixed cost though, since we're going to feed and educate our youth anyway, unless Sam Altman would have those people to starve to death.

Has there ever been at time when a wealthy person would run their mouth like this without any fear of an angry mob tearing their limbs off their body? Maybe right before the French revolution?

I get the feeling that this guy has never been punched in the mouth. Otherwise he might be more careful with what he says.

This comparison only works if you assume scaling keeps paying off. Sara Hooker's research shows (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5877662) compact models now outperform massive predecessors and scaling laws only predict pre-training loss, not downstream performance. If marginal returns on compute are falling (https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-most-expensive-assumptio...), "energy per query" hides the real problem, a trillion dollars of infrastructure built on the bet that they won't.

You are the carbon they want to reduce

I asked ChatGPT to do some napkin math, and it seems like on average it would take a human 13.75 million kcal worth of food, in those 20 years.

If I were one of his family, I'd advise him to hire someone to stop himself from saying things like this.

Training an LLM takes petabytes of theft.