This seems to be missing the most obvious optimization that Google are clearly doing. When you see an AI answer to your question on Goole I guarantee that Google hasn't gone off and put your query into an AI. What it has almost certainly done is stick your query into the same processing engine that all the other queries go to, and found a flag that says "Oh I have a pre-computed AI answer to this" and returns that. It's probably of the same order of magnitude as serving that little wikipedia summary that it shows for prominent people. Google isn't in the game of hand crafting answers to your queries so the one-off cost of putting that query into the AI is amortized over billions of answers it serves.
What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#12This is just another reason to tax externalities and be done with it. Guilt tripping on totally arbitrary things just isn't going to work. We already have a mechanism for managing scarce resources, it's called price, so let's just use it.
The price at use is free, so how much should we tax it?
At source. Taxes on the sale of LNG, taxes on the production of GHG by power plants, fuel duty, potentially on activities like mining, etc.
Setting the rate is more complex, but anything at all would be a start.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price at use is free, so how much should we tax it?
At source. Taxes on the sale of LNG, taxes on the production of GHG by power plants, fuel duty, potentially on activities like mining, etc. Setting the rate is more complex, but anything at all would be a start.
It would be a start - impossible not to be - but you might suffer adverse consequences. Either: you make other things expensive you didn't mean to, through the wrong granularity of rule, or you didn't catch people who slightly changed their position to not have the rule applied to them any more. And either case: lots of energy spent defining rules and having each company analyse whether or not its affected and then what to do about it.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#14This is such a strange line of thought. What would it cost a human to go through the same training data and come up with a similar summary? Across all the fields and languages that Google has access to? Even compared to regular indexing, it's not exactly apples to apples. You still have to go through a dozen or more links and manually read them and filter out spam before getting a good idea. It's be fairer to compare…
I agree, also think about just how much paper one should print/buy in bookform to get the same data. That said Jevons Paradox seems to be a hardcoded feature of the physical underpinnings of modern society, so we're probably headed for some sort of "busybody" machine world with AI's everywhere that are highly efficient but also highly wasteful. Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use o…
> the ever increasing layers of abstraction in computing where a supercomputer at home can have trouble rendering a basic desktop interface without latency these days.
This is such an embarrassment. It is lunacy that a modern desktop OS feels more sluggish than a late 90s box.
I wonder how much of the perceived lag in modern OSes would be mitigated by a buzzing chunking HD or floppy though. Like you could hear the computer working.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#15I've seen discussion about analog circuits which might do a lot of the work for much less power. I hope people are seriously investigating it. I think maybe analog computers were abandoned too quickly.
The issue with analog computers is error accumulation, non determinism due to environmental factors and calibration requirements.
However you can have an architecture that deals with the error well enough to make useful estimates. Artificial and biological neural networks for instance.
Some neuromorphic chips use analog components for storage and processing. Some people are trying to go the other way around and grow biological neurons in a chip (indeed, very low power, though maybe more effort to feed it nutrients).
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, also think about just how much paper one should print/buy in bookform to get the same data. That said Jevons Paradox seems to be a hardcoded feature of the physical underpinnings of modern society, so we're probably headed for some sort of "busybody" machine world with AI's everywhere that are highly efficient but also highly wasteful. Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use o…
> Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use of earths resources I think that's not true. The amount of material needed to make a computer, and the power to drive it, has gone down incredibly since valve-based, room-sized computers, alongside the simultaneous massive increase in power.
And there are many more of them.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
At source. Taxes on the sale of LNG, taxes on the production of GHG by power plants, fuel duty, potentially on activities like mining, etc. Setting the rate is more complex, but anything at all would be a start.
It would be a start - impossible not to be - but you might suffer adverse consequences. Either: you make other things expensive you didn't mean to, through the wrong granularity of rule, or you didn't catch people who slightly changed their position to not have the rule applied to them any more. And either case: lots of energy spent defining rules and having each company analyse whether or not its affected and then w…
Sure.
It is still substantially more effective and easier than trying to look at literally every individual thing we do and guilt people into doing different things.
It's just not going to work, people will use AI anyway.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#18Rather like the energy consumed by spam/antispam or the energy cost of unwanted advertising, the energy cost of an unwanted LLM response at the top of search queries is just another thing consumers are going to have to put up with being made to feel guilty about.
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Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#19> She and her colleagues calculated that the large language model BLOOM emitted greenhouse gases equivalent to 19 kilograms of CO2 per day of use, or the amount generated by driving 49 miles in an average gas-powered car.
If you go on to read the paper, you discover this is an outright lie. These figures are for training, not usage.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#20This seems to be missing the most obvious optimization that Google are clearly doing. When you see an AI answer to your question on Goole I guarantee that Google hasn't gone off and put your query into an AI. What it has almost certainly done is stick your query into the same processing engine that all the other queries go to, and found a flag that says "Oh I have a pre-computed AI answer to this" and returns that. I…
Caching definitely helps, I agree there's no way Google would be wasting so much re-running every search token through Gemini.
That said, it's still worth calling out that their Gemini answers use drastically more resources whenever they are run and cached. We'd have to know Google's caching rules and the average frequency of cache hits to know how much it actually reduces the Gemini resource usage.