What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
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What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#2This 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 the LLM summary to some other scraper and summarization system.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#3Rather 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.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#4There will be a massive drive to do LLM inference cheaper at lower power. Also there is a huge gold rush in AI now. Who knows what will survive? Who will need GPUs?
Finally there are advantages of scale to centralizing resources that will create high degree of incentive and specialization to drive down cost and power consumption at these data centers.
It’s just gonna be insane until the near term uncertainty is ironed out.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#5This 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 of earths resources, well mirrored in 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.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#6This 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.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#7I'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.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#8Rather 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 would spam energy make consumers feel guilty?
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#9This 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
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.
Re: What Do Google's AI Answers Cost the Environment?
#10This 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?