this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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[–] Virkkunen@fedia.io 164 points 4 months ago (7 children)

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!

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (12 children)

Google ghg emissions in 2023 are 14.3 million metric tons. Which are a ridiculous percentage of global emissions.

Commercial aviation emissions are 935.000 million metric tons by year.

So IDK about plastic straws or google. But really if people stopped flying around so much that would actually make a dent on global emissions.

Don't get me wrong, google is a piece of shit. But they are not the ones causing climate change, neither is AI technology. Planes, cars, meat industry, offshore production... Those are some of the truly big culprits.

[–] masquenox@lemmy.world 26 points 4 months ago (4 children)

But they are not the ones causing climate change

The owners of google are capitalists. They are as responsible for climate change as any other capitalist.

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[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 62 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works 14 points 4 months ago (3 children)

As a buzzword or whatever this is leagues worse than "agile", which I already loathed the overuse/integration of.

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[–] set_secret@lemmy.world 49 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

With adblock enabled I feel like their results are often better than for example Duckduckgo. I recently switched to using DDG as my standard search engine but I regularly find myself using Google instead to get the results I'm looking for.

[–] Ledivin@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Interesting, I'm actually the exact opposite. I always start with Google, because it's usually good enough, but whenever it takes 2-3 tries to get something relevant, I switch to ddg and get it first try.

[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (8 children)

My issue is mostly with image search results. DDG's images tend to be less relevant than Google's. DDG also lacks "smart" results (idk the official term).

For example when you search "rng 25" on Google, it will immediately present you with a random number between 1 and 25. On DDG you have to click on one of the search results and then use some website to generate the number.

Or when searching for the results of a soccer game, Google will immediately present all the stats to you, while on DDG you will only find some articles about it.

Of course it really depends on the kind of search and I'm sure DDG will regularly have better results than Google too.

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[–] darkevilmac@lemmy.zip 39 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Exactly. The difference between a cached response and a live one even for non-AI queries is an OOM difference.

At this point, a lot of people just care about the 'feel' of anti-AI articles even if the substance is BS though.

And then people just feed whatever gets clicks and shares.

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[–] AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I hadn't really heard of the TPU chips until a couple weeks ago when my boss told me about how he uses USB versions for at-home ML processing of his closed network camera feeds. At first I thought he was using NVIDIA GPUs in some sort of desktop unit and just burning energy...but I looked the USB things up and they're wildly efficient and he says they work just fine for his applications. I was impressed.

[–] darkevilmac@lemmy.zip 5 points 4 months ago

Yeah they're pretty impressive for some at home stuff and they're not even that costly.

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[–] lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 39 points 4 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] pycorax@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There are legitimate uses of AI in certain fields like medical research and 3D reconstruction that aren't just a scam. However, most of these are not consumer facing and the average person won't really hear about them.

It's unfortunate that what you said is very true on the consumer side of things...

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[–] Raxiel@lemmy.world 36 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If only Google had a working search engine before AI

[–] Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz 26 points 4 months ago

Yes, but now we can get much worse results and three pages of ads for ten times the energy cost. Capitalism at its finest.

[–] blackwateropeth@lemmy.world 30 points 4 months ago

And it’s only 10x more useless :)

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 22 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] Facebones@reddthat.com 21 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Its not even hidden, people just give zero fucks about how their magical rectangle works and get mad if you try to tell them.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

To be fair, it was never "hidden" since all the top 5 decided that GPU was the way to go with this monetization.

Guess who is waiting on the other side of this idiocy with a solution? AMD with cheap FPGA that will do all this work at 10x the speed and similar energy reduction. At a massive fraction of the cost and hassle for cloud providers.

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[–] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] jfx@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

DDG has also gotten much worse since the introduction of AI features.

[–] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 5 points 4 months ago

I haven't had any problems myself.

In fact, I regularly use their anonymized LLM Chat tab to help out with restructuring data, summarizing some more complex topics, or finding some info that doesn't readily appear near the top of search. It's made my search experience (again, specifically in my circumstance) much better than before.

[–] repungnant_canary@lemmy.world 12 points 4 months ago (5 children)

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?

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It's another untapped market they can monopolize. (Or just run at a loss because investors are happy with another imaginary pot of gold at the end of another rainbow.)

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[–] PanArab@lemm.ee 10 points 4 months ago (12 children)

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

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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago

Wow AI is just so amazing

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm surprised it's only 10x. Running a prompt though a llm takes quite a bit of energy, so I guess even the regular searches take more energy than I thought.

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[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

If these guys gave a shit they'd focus on light based chips, which are in very early stages, but will save a lot of power.

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[–] Lyricism6055@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

I switched to Kagi like 6 months ago and I still love it. Almost never have to go back to google except for maps.

[–] brrt@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 months ago

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.

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