Everyone is panicking about how much water AI uses. Nobody runs the math.
In this Fargo Walks episode I put one AI prompt next to one California almond.
Bring me your business problem. fargofactor.ai
It takes 12 liters of water to grow one California almond. That is the full water footprint, rain included (Fulton et al., Ecological Indicators, 2019). One AI prompt takes about 15 milliliters. That sits inside the 10 to 50 milliliters per response that UC Riverside researchers published for ChatGPT. Divide one by the other and you get 800 prompts to one almond.
Sam Altman said this week that 38,000 ChatGPT queries equal one almond, and PolitiFact rated it Mostly False. My numbers are the ones that go hardest against AI. The gap is still enormous.
If the water headline is what's keeping you from using AI in your business, that's the wrong reason. Decide on the work AI does for you, not on the panic.
I'm Jeff Fargo, founder of Fargo Factor. Fargo Walks is my short series on making AI do real work in your business. I help established owners streamline and scale with AI.
Bring me your business problem. fargofactor.ai
