Sam Altman: Know What Else Used a Lot of Energy? Human Civilization
Gizmodo
Interview with The Indian Express (Express Adda) at the India AI Impact Summit, New Delhi
“It also takes a lot of energy to train a human ... It takes like 20 years of life, and all the food you eat before that time, before you get smart”
Sam Altman20 February 2026- What you'll lose1/5
Twenty years of life and food, filed as overhead.
- Condescension3/5
Human childhood as a training run.
- Tone-deafness5/5
Compared raising a person to training a model.
- Doom0/5
None.
- Hypocrisy0/5
None.
Full time9 pitchforksof a possible 25
Think the referee got a count wrong?
Call received. VAR is having a look: the referee reviews every call, and the score stands until then.
The occasion
Interview with The Indian Express (Express Adda) at the India AI Impact Summit, New Delhi, 20 February 2026.
Context
Asked about AI's energy and water use, Altman called viral claims about gallons of water per ChatGPT query untrue, said concern about total energy is fair and that the world should move to nuclear, wind and solar quickly, and argued a fair comparison is the energy per query once a model is trained versus a human answering a question.
Crowd reaction
Widespread criticism
Gizmodo says social media roasted the remark as 'dystopian' and 'deeply antisocial and antihuman'; The Cool Down reports it went viral and drew criticism from Zoho's Sridhar Vembu ('I do not want to see a world where we equate a piece of technology to a human being').
- Primary source, video
- Gizmodo: Sam Altman: Know What Else Used a Lot of Energy? Human Civilization
- Fortune: Trending now
- The Cool Down: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ignites backlash over disturbing comments about human life: 'It's the entire point of existence'
- TechCrunch: Sam Altman would like to remind you that humans use a lot of energy, too
- Where the exact words are printed