“People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote in an aside in a long blog post last week. As a result, Sasha Luccioni, the climate lead at AI company Hugging Face, doesn’t put too much stock in Altman’s number. As AI takes over our lives, it’s also promising to transform our energy systems, supercharging carbon emissions right as we’re trying to fight climate change. An analysis submitted for peer review this week by Luccioni and three other authors looks at the need for more environmental transparency in AI models. You may have heard, for instance, that the average ChatGPT request takes 10 times as much energy as the average Google search.