Three Years of ChatGPT: From "Wow" Moments to Environmental Devastation

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It was a day after which much would change in the world: on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT, the now world-famous AI chatbot from developer OpenAI, went online. It overshadowed all previous ones: the new go-to for writing assistance, training plans, and much more provided many a wow moment. The LLM GPT-3.5 in the background made it possible.

Now at GPT-5, the popular chatbot has around 800 million active users per week worldwide (as of July 2025). The numbers have recently risen sharply again: in March, there were only 500 million users. OpenAI shared these figures with heise online. Germany is thus in fourth place for ChatGPT users worldwide, but OpenAI does not provide a specific number for this.

In Germany, people most frequently use ChatGPT for writing or proofreading, for advice and instructions, information retrieval, health, fitness, and beauty tips, learning, tutoring, and teaching, coaching, and support in achieving personal goals.

Not even Helene Fischer is safe

Not even singer Helene Fischer is safe from the LLM. However, this is more on the downside of the trend. For training its LLMs, OpenAI used massive amounts of copyrighted content such as books, news articles, or music. Authors, artists, and publishers felt their works were stolen and took OpenAI to court. The AI manufacturer had to answer to, among others, The New York Times, several major Indian news outlets, US book authors, and also GEMA in Germany.

The Munich Regional Court ruled in November in favor of the plaintiff GEMA; it also concerned songs by megastars like Helene Fischer and Herbert Grönemeyer, which ChatGPT was apparently trained on. However, the question of how copyrighted material can be handled correctly in LLM training is far from being settled in general. A heated debate about it has long been underway.

All those who are riding the wave ignited by ChatGPT with their AI models – such as Meta, Anthropic, and Google – are no less guilty of alleged copyright infringements than OpenAI. In the race for the best AI, the law doesn't always seem to play a role. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once explicitly instructed his employees to download books from illegal file-sharing sites to obtain training material.

Discussions about an AI bubble

With ChatGPT, OpenAI presented an innovation that everyone understands and can be used in almost every area of life. It caused a boom in the capital market, which many already . The seven most valuable companies in the S&P 500 stock index, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Tesla, are almost all major players in the AI sector. And they are also responsible for almost half of the profits in the benchmark index since the release of ChatGPT. A big winner of the trend is GPU manufacturer Nvidia. Through the business with AI accelerators, the company is now worth more than five trillion dollars – the first company ever. OpenAI itself is not publicly traded, but Microsoft holds a stake in the company, and both have a partnership in the development of ChatGPT.

Numerous AI startups with sometimes peculiar business ideas have sprung up since 2022. The Harvard Economist analyzed in October that 92 percent of US GDP growth this year is based on the boom around AI data centers. Many are reminded of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Numerous banks and even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have spoken of a potential AI bubble that could burst. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) estimates that current AI systems could already replace 11.7 percent of the US labor market.

A race at environmental cost

But it's not just the economy that the release of ChatGPT has changed. The AI industry has since considered environmental impact as secondary as copyright law. For the training and operation of ChatGPT, large amounts of water were sometimes consumed in the past. Specific figures are available for one of Microsoft's data centers involved in West Des Moines, Iowa. In July 2022, Microsoft accounted for 6 percent of the water consumed in the entire district.

And the electricity demand for AI training is also high: Microsoft therefore wants to bring an old US nuclear power plant back online and build mini nuclear power plants. Meta, Google and Amazon also want to rely on nuclear power for AI. The technology caused Microsoft's CO2 emissions to rise by up to 40 percent last year, by up to 40, while for Google it was 13 percent.

Elon Musk was among the co-founders

The ChatGPT forge OpenAI began in 2015 as a startup in San Francisco, whose roughly dozen founders included Altman and tech billionaire Elon Musk. The goal to this day is to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for humanity – an AI that is generally on par with human intelligence. For this purpose, OpenAI operated as a nonprofit organization until recently. However, under pressure from its investors, OpenAI had to transform into a for-profit structure.

OpenAI is also urgently dependent on its financiers; the company would likely hardly be able to survive on ChatGPT alone. These include tech and investment companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, and Softbank. A total of 57.9 billion dollars has been raised in various funding rounds. More money is likely to follow; Nvidia recently announced, for example, a $100 billion investment.

Still peanuts compared to what OpenAI intends to spend in the coming years. In September, Altman committed to acquiring more than 26 gigawatts of capacity from Oracle, Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom. The cost over the next ten years: well over a trillion US dollars, according to calculations by the Financial Times.

Loss-making business with ChatGPT

Recently, the ChatGPT developers incurred a massive loss. OpenAI does not publish financial figures. However, Microsoft owns 27 percent of the company's shares and reports the profits or losses of this investment in its financial report. Extrapolated, this amounts to a loss of $11.5 billion for OpenAI in the third quarter; it is then 11.5 billion dollars in losses.

ChatGPT generates little money when considering the associated costs. OpenAI achieves an annual recurring revenue of around 13 billion US dollars. Of this, 70 percent comes from consumers who use ChatGPT, reports the Financial Times, citing OpenAI sources. A ChatGPT Plus subscription costs 23 euros per month in Germany, and the Pro version is available for 299 euros.

Altman reacts irritably

It's best not to bring this topic up with Altman. US investor Brad Gerstner confronted Altman on his podcast, stating that OpenAI earns about 13 billion US dollars annually but has already contractually committed to a trillion in expenses. The answer: "First of all, we are generating far higher revenues." However, Altman does not explain how they are doing this. "Second, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find a buyer for you." But he also admitted that OpenAI could still mess it up – but only if they don't get enough access to computing resources.

The exorbitant costs for operating and further developing ChatGPT don't seem to bother Altman in the least. For him, only the grand goal of AGI seems to matter – and on the way there, to surpass all competitors in their gigantism. Three turbulent years lie behind ChatGPT; the next three will certainly be no less exciting. This also applies to all other AI generators, such as OpenAI's Sora for videos, Grok from Elon Musk's X-AI, and Adobe's Firefly. Their rapid development would hardly have been possible without the success of ChatGPT.

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