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Andy Masley

Effective Altruism DC

TIME100 AI 2026 (TIME, Thinkers; opens in new tab)

  • 1 episode on Chain of Thought
  • 1 topic covered
  • 1 full transcript
  • Nov 2025 first on the show
Andy Masley

At the time of the conversation, Andy Masley was Director of Effective Altruism DC. On Chain of Thought he fact-checked widely repeated claims about AI’s environmental cost, including a data-center water-usage figure in a bestselling book that he found was off by a factor of 4,500.

Cover art for Debunking AI's Environmental Panic | Andy Masley

Latest episode with Andy Masley · EP 45

Debunking AI's Environmental Panic | Andy Masley

Andy Masley, Effective Altruism DC ·

Show notes & transcript → All listening options →

Episodes

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These notes summarize the episodes featuring Andy Masley, including other speakers in panel conversations. Follow a source link to read the discussion in context.

EP 45 Debunking AI's Environmental Panic | Andy Masley

  • Andy Masley found the data-center water claim in Karen Hao’s Empire of AI is off by a factor of about 4,500. The book says one data center uses 1,000x the water of a community of 88,000 people living in an area of Santiago, Chile; the book’s numbers implied each resident consumed only ~0.1 liters a day — “a fifth of a single bottle of water.” As Masley put it: “They’d all be dead.” Episode takeaways
  • The 4,500x error included a units mix-up, one of two issues, — the source confused liters with cubic meters (1 m³ = 1,000 liters) — and had stood uncorrected for the six months the book had been out. Corrected, the data center uses roughly 25% of the water in that one section of Santiago and about 3% of the entire municipal system: a real footprint, but a fraction of what the book described. Episode takeaways
  • Adding up everything — inference, cooling, amortized training, data transmission, and the embodied carbon of the chips — Masley estimates a median ChatGPT prompt causes about 1/150,000th of your daily emissions. To raise your daily emissions by 1% you’d need to send roughly 1,000 prompts, which would take seven to eight hours of reading replies — a day on which your emissions are likely lower than normal. Episode takeaways

In their words

So EA very generally is a broad movement, that's very heterogeneous. I would say it's actually kind of eight or nine unrelated movements all under the same similar umbrella. The main idea is that you should try your best to use evidence and reason and debate to figure out where you can do the very most good with either your charitable donations or the time that you spend in your career, basically.

Andy Masley Debunking AI's Environmental Panic | Andy Masley · 23:26

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Essay featuring Andy Masley