If you’ve ever bought a gallon of almond milk, you’ve probably used more water than most people will use on AI in their entire lives.

If you’ve ever bought a gallon of almond milk, you’ve probably used more water than most people will use on AI in their entire lives.

Sam Altman said the quiet part two weeks ago and then stopped one sentence too soon.

38,000 ChatGPT questions.

That’s one California almond.

He was trying to kill the meme that every prompt is a six-hour shower. Fair. That meme was always sloppy.

He just didn’t take his own number to the grocery store.

A gallon of the almond milk most people actually buy isn’t some dense vat of nuts. It’s about 60 almonds and a lot of filtered water.

Sixty almonds. Times 38,000 questions each.

That’s a few million prompts.

OpenAI’s own usage data says a typical free user asks about 7 questions a day. Plus users do more. Power users do a lot more.

Do the unglamorous version of the math anyway.

Seven questions a day, every day, for 80 years, is still only a handful of almonds.

A lifetime of ChatGPT, for most people, never reaches the carton.

I’m not saying data centers are free. They’re not. Put one in a dry basin and it matters.

I am saying we got trained to feel guilty about a sentence we typed, and almost nobody feels guilty about the half-gallon sitting in the fridge.

That’s the tell.

The water conversation is real.
The version of it that starts with your chat box and ignores your cereal is not.

If this made you defensive about almond milk or defensive about AI, good. That’s the point. We should argue about the actual gallons.