Technology

Don't worry folks, if we all stop using plastic straws and take 30 second showers, we'll be able to offset 5% of the carbon emissions this AI has!

The annoying part is how many mainstream tech companies have ham-fisted AI into every crevice of every product. It isn't necessary and I'm not convinced it results in a "better search result" for 90% of the crap people throw into Google. Basic indexed searches are fine for most use cases.

If only Google had a working search engine before AI

And yet it's still garbage....like their search

AI is just what crypto bros moved onto after people realized that was a scam. It's immature technology that uses absurd amounts of energy for a solution in search of a problem, being pushed as the future, all for the prospect of making more money. Except this time it's being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.

I skimmed the article, but it seems to be assuming that Google's LLM is using the same architecture as everyone else. I'm pretty sure Google uses their TPU chips instead of a regular GPU like everyone else. Those are generally pretty energy efficient.

That and they don't seem to be considering how much data is just being cached for questions that are the same. And a lot of Google searches are going to be identical just because of the search suggestions funneling people into the same form of a question.

The confounding part is that when I do get offered an "AI result", it's basically identical to the excerpt in the top "traditional search" result. It wasted a fair amount more time and energy to repeat what the top of the search said anyway. I've never seen the AI overview ever be more useful than the top snippet.

I build AI for a living, and I can tell you that generative AI is a crock of shit.

And it’s only 10x more useless :)

The results used to be better too. AI just produces junk faster.

If only they did what DuckDuckGo did and made it so it only popped up in very specific circumstances, primarily only drawing from current summarized information from Wikipedia in addition to its existing context, and allowed the user to turn it off completely in one click of a setting toggle.

I find it useful in DuckDuckGo because it's out of the way, unobtrusive, and only pops up when necessary. I've tried using Google with its search AI enabled, and it was the most unusable search engine I've used in years.

I'm genuinely curious where their penny picking went? All of tech companies shove ads into our throats and steal our privacy justifying that by saying they operate at loss and need to increase income. But suddenly they can afford spending huge amounts on some shit that won't give them any more income. How do they justify it then?

Where are all the people that were so damn pissed with Bitcoins power consumption now?

Or was it never about the power consumption in the first place and now that little Timmy has an Ai buddy the waste of electricity is fine. SMH

It’s far more important that every country fixes how it legally generates power that isn’t green. Make burning coal illegal already.

This is terrible. Why don't we build nuclear power plants, rollout a carbon tax, and put incentives for companies to make their own energy via renewables?

You know the shit that we should have been doing before I was born.

Wow AI is just so amazing

I wonder what the power consumption of getting to the information in the summary is as a whole when using a regular search, clicking on multiple links, finding the right information and extracting the relevant parts. Including the expenditures of energy by the human performing the task and everything that surrounds the activity.

There are real concerns surrounding AI, I wonder if this is truly one of them or if it’s just poorly researched ragebait.