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What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#21

Post by _heimdall »

pjc50 wrote: post #3

Rather 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.

Why do users need to feel guilty? They should know the cost, and from there they can either accept it and keep using Google or go somewhere else.

There's always the end case where no search tools offer LLM-free results, but even then a person can still just not use search if they really care.

Its just about informed consent in my book.

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#22

Post by _heimdall »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #6

This 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.

How does a tax fix it? Sure the government takes in the money and could even do right about how they allocate spending it, but the damage (so to speak) is caused before the tax is ever collected.

Consumers just need to know how it actually works, at least at the most basic level of what the costs are. From there either consumers don't care or stop using it. Do we really need the government forcing more morals on us through another sin tax?

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#23

Post by Mo3 »

achileas wrote: post #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.

Uhm, well even if it was for usage that's a pretty small amount of emissions. For training abysmally small

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#24

Post by ecshafer »

achileas wrote: post #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.

So there are probably hundreds of thousands of times more greenhouse gases produced from google having employees go into the office, than they use for training

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#25

Post by jgalt212 »

_heimdall wrote: post #20
SilverBirch wrote: post #11

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. 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.

Yes, but all this compute is great for Google's Cloud Business revenues!

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#27

Post by _heimdall »

jgalt212 wrote: post #25
_heimdall wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but all this compute is great for Google's Cloud Business revenues!

Smort. Monopolies gonna monopoly.

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#28

Post by robertlagrant »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #17
robertlagrant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see why taxation is a good solution to guilt. Information is. Is Google using anything but renewables powering the AI stuff? Is this even in the top million things people do that generates pollution in some way? Until you know, why would you feel anything?

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#29

Post by zekrioca »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #5
solardev wrote: post #2

This 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…

> Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use of earths resources

Could you list some of these processes you are referring to?

Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?

#30

Post by tmpz22 »

ecshafer wrote: post #24
achileas wrote: post #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.

So there are probably hundreds of thousands of times more greenhouse gases produced from google having employees go into the office, than they use for training

The return to office was necessary for Google to have a coherent product strategy \s
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