He then went on to make a broader argument about the amount of energy consumed by AI relative to that required to produce an economically productive human being. “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model,” he said, “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. I’m tempted to suggest here, to avoid just credulously feeding the current iteration of the AI hype cycle, that Altman is being deliberately provocative. (Among the more canonical and memorable descriptions of this worldview came from the mathematician Marvin Minsky, an early pioneer of AI.

Source: The Irish Times March 01, 2026 10:58 UTC