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Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

blog.ecosia.org

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Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#51

Post by pretendgeneer »

JimDabell wrote: post #49
pretendgeneer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And when you have the opportunity to use human labour or AI, AI is almost certainly the greener option as well. For instance, the carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are far lower for AI than for humans: Do you plan on killing that person to stop their emissions? If you don't use the AI program the emissions don't happen, if you don't hire a person for a job, they still use the carbon resources. So the com…

Please read the source I linked to; your reply doesn’t make any sense in that context.

I did, you clearly didn't.

> For instance, the emission footprint of a US resident is approximately 15 metric tons CO2e per year22, which translates to roughly 1.7 kg CO2e per hour

Those 15,000kg of CO2e are emitted regardless of that that person does.

The article also makes assumptions about laptops that are false.

>Assuming an average power consumption of 75 W for a typical laptop computer.

Laptops draw closer to 10W than 75W, (peak power is closer to 75W but almost not laptops can dissipate 75W continually).

The article is clearly written by someone with an axe to grind, not someone who is interested in understanding the cost of LLM's/AI/etc.

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#52

Post by vitus »

belval wrote: post #18
bcye wrote: post #13

Reminder that LLMs only(?) consume energy on the order of a few seconds of Netflix[1]. [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2...

Netflix spending 240Wh for 1h of content just does not pass the smell test for me. Today I can have ~8 people streaming from my Jellyfin instance which is a server that consumes about 35W, measured at the wall. That's ~5Wh per hour of content from me not even trying.

It's way more lopsided than your example would suggest.

My understanding is that Netflix can stream 100 Gbps from a 100W server footprint (slide 17 of [0]). Even if you assume every stream is 4k and uses 25 Mbps, that's still thousands of streams. I would guess that the bulk of the power consumption from streaming video is probably from the end-user devices -- a backbone router might consume a couple of kilowatts of power, but it's also moving terabits of traffic.

[0] https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#53

Post by binary132 »

HelloUsername wrote: post #3
Barathkanna wrote: post #2

Looks interesting. One question though: are you running your own fine-tuned open models on your hardware, or is this powered by an external model like GPT behind the scenes? Curious how independent the stack really is.

"Great question! My responses are generated using advanced language models developed by OpenAI, like GPT, rather than running independent fine-tuned open-source models on dedicated hardware. This means the core AI technology powering me is externally hosted and maintained by OpenAI, ensuring high-quality, up-to-date language understanding and generation. However, my design and integration are tailored to prioritize v…

why would anyone downvote this?

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#54

Post by JimDabell »

pretendgeneer wrote: post #51
JimDabell wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read the source I linked to; your reply doesn’t make any sense in that context.

I did, you clearly didn't. > For instance, the emission footprint of a US resident is approximately 15 metric tons CO2e per year22, which translates to roughly 1.7 kg CO2e per hour Those 15,000kg of CO2e are emitted regardless of that that person does. The article also makes assumptions about laptops that are false. >Assuming an average power consumption of 75 W for a typical laptop computer. Laptops draw closer to 1…

It says that ignoring the human carbon use, just their computer use during the task far outweighs the AI energy use. So your response “are you planning on killing the human?” makes zero sense in that context. “They are wrong about the energy use of a laptop” makes more sense , but you didn’t say that until I pushed you to actually read it.

75W is not outlandish when you consider the artist will almost certainly have a large monitor plugged in, external accessories, some will be using a desktop, etc. And even taking the smaller figure, AI use is still smaller.

The human carbon use is still relevant. If they were not doing the writing, they could accomplish some other valuable tasks. Because they are spending it on things the AI can do, somebody else will have to do those things or they won’t get done at all.

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#55

Post by JimDabell »

defrost wrote: post #50
JimDabell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true It’s not true. AI isn’t especially environmentally unfriendly, which means that if you’re using AI then whatever activity you would otherwise be doing stands a good chance of being more environmentally unfriendly. For instance, a ChatGPT prompt uses about as much energy as watc…

How many tens of thousands more pages of text and image are churned out per human created page though? Pages that would never be created were the stochastic parrot to be turned off and never squawk. It'd save a lot of energy, water, carbon emissions to just let the already existing humans just get on with the churn.

> How many tens of thousands more pages of text and image are churned out per human created page though?

I don’t know, how many?

> It'd save a lot of energy, water, carbon emissions to just let the already existing humans just get on with the churn.

How much, and how do you know that?

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#56

Post by ac29 »

belval wrote: post #18
bcye wrote: post #13

Reminder that LLMs only(?) consume energy on the order of a few seconds of Netflix[1]. [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2...

Netflix spending 240Wh for 1h of content just does not pass the smell test for me. Today I can have ~8 people streaming from my Jellyfin instance which is a server that consumes about 35W, measured at the wall. That's ~5Wh per hour of content from me not even trying.

The 240W number is end to end, including the power usage of a TV. Its also the high end of the estimate of 120-240W

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#58

Post by benrutter »

JimDabell wrote: post #40
Insanity wrote: post #17

People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true but it’s an apples to pears comparison. Clearly Ecosia is pushing for “people want AI” _and_ we want to make it more ecofriendly. Taking away features from users altogether is not the right answer. It’s like saying “cheapest car is no car”. It doesn’t solve the fundamental proble…

> People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true It’s not true. AI isn’t especially environmentally unfriendly, which means that if you’re using AI then whatever activity you would otherwise be doing stands a good chance of being more environmentally unfriendly. For instance, a ChatGPT prompt uses about as much energy as watc…

> AI isn’t especially environmentally unfriendly

I think the actual answer is more nuanced and less positive. Although I appreciste how many citations your comment has!

I'd point to just oe, which is a really good article MIT's technology review published about exactly this issue[0].

I'd make two overall points firstly to:

> when you have the opportunity to use human labour or AI, AI is almost certainly the greener option as well.

I think that this is never the trade off, AI normally generates marketing copy for someone in marketing, not by itself, and even when if it does everything itself, the marketing person might stop being employed but certainly doesn't stop existing and producing co2.

My point is, AI electricity usage is almost exclusively new usage, not replacing something else.

And secondly on Simon Wilison / Sam Altman's argument that:

> Assuming that higher end, a ChatGPT prompt by Sam Altman's estimate uses: > > 0.34 Wh / (240 Wh / 3600 seconds) = 5.1 seconds of Netflix > > Or double that, 10.2 seconds, if you take the lower end of the Netflix estimate instead.

This may well be true for prompts, but misses out the energy intensive training process. Which we can't do if we actually want to know the full emmisions impact. Especially in an environment when new models are being trained all the time.

On a more positive note, I think Ecosia's article makes a good point that AI requires electricity, not pollution. It's a really bad piece of timing that AI has taken off initially in the US at a time when the political climate is trying to steer energy away from safer more sustainable sources, and towards more dangerous, polluting ones. But that isn't an environment thay has to continue, and Chinese AI work in the last year has also done a good job of demonstrating that AI trainibg energy use can be a lot kess than previously assumed.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#59

Post by benrutter »

I'll be interested to see how this pkays with their actual users.

As one myself, I don't object inherently to Ecosia providing AI search. I understand they need to stay competitive with other search.

But I find how prominent / hard to avoid their AI search is, reeeeaaally annoying. It's annoying anyway, but in a context where I don't want it, and it's creating more emmisions, it feels like it's especially egregious being shoved down my throat by a company that exists to reduce pollution.

Re: Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

#60

Post by snailmailman »

observationist wrote: post #31
arnaudsm wrote: post #6

Running an LLM by default when I open your site is the most energy-consuming thing a computer can do, and the thing consumers hate the most in 2025.

This is absurd. Training an AI is energy intensive but highly efficient. Running inference for a few hundred tokens, doing a search, stuff like that is a triviality. Each generated token takes the equivalent energy of the heat from burning ~.06 µL of gasoline per token. ~2 joules per token, including datacenter and hosting overhead. If you get up to massive million token prompts, it can get up to the 8-10 joules per…

I’m curious where you got any of those numbers. Many laptops use Compared to traditional computing it seems to me like there’s no way AI is power efficient. Especially when so many of the generated tokens are just platitudes and hallucinations.
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