Altman Dismisses AI Water Worries, Says AI Needs More Than Cancer Cure

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated on Thursday that artificial intelligence needs to achieve more than curing cancer to win over skeptics, telling Bloomberg Television, "I don't think a cure for cancer is enough."

He suggested AI should also enable a boom in creativity and entrepreneurship. Altman believes the tech industry has done a terrible job making the positive case for AI, contributing to souring public trust. According to the Pew Research Center, 40% of Americans predict AI will have a negative impact on society, while 16% expect a positive impact.

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI rival Anthropic, previously stated that AI needs to actually cure cancer to win over the public. Altman also dismissed concerns about AI data center water consumption as exaggerated, calling a viral narrative that a single ChatGPT query uses as much water as a six-hour shower an online myth. He compared the water needed for approximately 38,000 ChatGPT queries to the water used to produce a single almond in California.

Altman explained that modern data centers have phased out older evaporative cooling designs that consumed large volumes of water. Protesters, some reportedly paid $30, gathered outside the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Wednesday to target Altman. Altman called the Trump administration's voluntary review of OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model a productive process.