thirsty-ai

"AI isn't magic. It drinks."

Thirsty AI is a minimalist, open-source project designed to visualize the hidden environmental cost of modern Artificial Intelligence. It calculates the water consumption (Scope 1 Cooling + Scope 2 Energy Generation) of LLM queries and media generation.

🧪 The Science

Calculations are based on 2024/2025 environmental reports (UC Riverside / Microsoft).

| Action | Cost (ml) | Context | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Chat | 15 ml | Standard GPT-4o class query. | | Reason | 150 ml | Chain-of-Thought (o1/Gemini). 10x compute heat. | | Image | 500 ml | SDXL / DALL-E 3. One full water bottle. | | Video | 3000 ml | High-compute video gen. A bucket of water. |

Why "Waste"? The water used to cool Data Center GPUs evaporates into the atmosphere. It is removed from the local watershed and does not return to the ground immediately.

💻 Web Application

The web interface features a fluid WebGL background that reacts to device orientation (Gyroscope) and visualizes the water level rising in real-time.

Development

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/mgks/thirsty-ai.git

# Run Local Server
npx http-server .

📦 NPM Package (thirsty-ai)

The core logic is available as a zero-dependency package for developers.

Installation

npm install thirsty-ai

Usage

import { ThirstyCalculator } from 'thirsty-ai';

const calc = new ThirstyCalculator();

// Add Interactions
calc.add('QUERY');      // +15ml
calc.add('IMAGE', 2);   // +1000ml (2 Images)

// Get Statistics
const stats = calc.getStats();
console.log(stats.formattedString); 
// Output: "Equivalent to 1.5 Bottles"

// Get a "Reality Check" Fact
// Returns a string based on the severity of usage
console.log(calc.getShockFact()); 
// Output: "One Liter. The amount required to keep a human alive for 8 hours..."

📄 License

MIT

{ github.com/mgks }