What Is the Cost of a Prompts?

Sam Altman (the CEO of OpenAI) has written a blog post called The Gentle Singularity where he mentioned that the cost of a single prompt with ChatGPT averages around 0.34 watt-hours[1], comparing it to the usage of an oven for rougly one second.

Do you remember the times when people where mentioning the costs of a Google search? With the rise of AI articles online it's harder to find original sources but I want to break done what a Google search query costs compared to a ChatGPT one. Also it would be great to find more resources about the potential power consumption of a single image and a single video prompt with different visual AI models.

Note from author: I'm still researching this topic. Feel free to come back later to read more about my findings and if you have sources to share fill free to drop me an email.

[1] Altman, Sam. The Gentle Singularity, Retrieved June 13, 2025 at 11:00 PM