whats up with these shit ass titles? It’s not even REMOTELY hidden, it takes two fucking seconds of googling to figure this shit out.
The entire AI industry was dependent on GPU hardware manufacturers, and nvidia is STILL back ordered (to my knowledge)
This is like saying that crypto has a hidden energy cost.
For you it might be clear. For the overwhelming majority of people, this is news. People don’t know shit about tech. Most would assume the AI thingy does its thing on the local computer.
Or there are bigger fish to fry like coal power plants and wasted idle etc. shit Google’s AI search results are wasteful in some cases but I’ve found it to actually improve my experience but I use a mix of search engines. You can always use one without AI or turn it off. It’s being pushed into almost every search though which I really don’t think is useful, and it would be best if they cached the answers instead of regeneration on command. They may cache some though.
As long as we are talking about crypto, and I know this is shocking, turns out some people are using it for unsavory acts. It is okay if you want to sit down.
Some people? The vast majority of the crypto eco system is grifters and get-rich-quick rubes.
Perhaps you need a seat then. Lol
There’s cocaine on literally every US Dollar and that currency is backed by oil, relatively speaking crypto is cleaner
I am against the drug war and I think the cocaine thing was an urban legend. Also the US dollar is not backed up by oil.
The US Dollar is not only backed by oil, but also American banking imperialism.
Im against the war on drugs too. But speaking of drugs, weed is schedule 1, where Xanax is schedule 4 (low risk of abuse). It’s completely upside down and not accurate. That said, the harmfulness of the substance and being for or against the war on drugs is completely separate from the fact that there’s cocaine on literally every single dollar bill. Money is the dirtiest thing in general, and by those metrics, the US Dollar is dirtier
The US Dollar is not only backed by oil, but also American banking imperialism.
Keep your story straight next time.
from the fact that there’s cocaine on literally every single dollar bill.
Prove it.
92%, I may have used the word literally figuratively, but so does every other American
That’s the proof man, it’s literally on the bills. We can literally see it
Also, what do you mean keep my story straight next time? It’s not controversial at all that the US gets involved in military conflicts for oil or financial control (neorealism, neoliberalism). Oil is just one of the many incentives which makes the USD arguably dirty
92% == 100%
my brother in christ people are making child pornography using generative AI. Everything sucks and is awful.
I don’t know what you want from me. I think it was pretty clear I was talking about crypto and badmouthing it. I won’t touch the child pornography generative AI issue with a ten foot pole and Covid mask.
nothing, i’m just making the point that it doesnt matter what you look at, there’s terrible shit happening everywhere.
It’s hidden in the sense that the normal user does not see the cost on their energy bill. You perform a search and get the result in milliseconds. That makes it easy to imagine that it’s just a minor operation. It’s not like driving a car and watching the the fuel gauge and see the consumption.
Of course one can research how much energy Google consumes and find out the background – IF you’re interested. But most people just use tech and do not question or even understand.
it’s hidden in the same sense that your closet is hidden.
Yet most people know they also have closets.
Ban them
Just don’t use them.
Tell that to schools or companies etc. You can’t just not use them. Maybe you can, but not everyone has that luxury.
I think it’s time to accept this is battle that can’t be won
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.
And yet it’s still garbage…like their search
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.
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.
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.
One example I had with DDG image search was transparent electronics, I couldnt find a way to get electronics with a transparent case, DDG would only give me generic electronics images that had transparency. Google got it though
Those kinds of things are what people often take issue with Google about. Well, the second one anyway. The first is arguably not a search and is instead a calculation, but I admit that’s a little semantical.
The first however, is Google taking information provided by third parties, and presenting it to the user. It prevents traffic from flowing through to the original site, and is something actively complained about.
And I should care about that because? Google is sparing me from visiting a website that will harass me to accept cookies, complain about my adblocker, probably request to send notifications, etc.
The same reason we don’t let companies sell photocopies of books? This isn’t a take on piracy, to be clear. This is a take on one company stealing content from another, and serving it up as if it were their own. And when Google has a monopoly on search, that fucks over everyone but Google, including you.
Extracting information from the internet that is freely available isn’t exactly stealing content. Haven’t you ever copied something from Wikipedia? Why would Wikipedia even exist if people can’t use and share its content?
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?
Perception. If a company isn’t on the leading edge we don’t consider them the best.
Regardless if you use them or not, if Google didn’t touch AI but Edge did you would believe edge is more advanced.
It doesn’t even need to appeal to you the user, but given the AI Gold Rush, they would have very unhappy investors if they did not.
Very good point
Because data is king and sessions are going to be worth a lot more than searches. Go through the following
-
Talk to a LLM about what product to buy
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Search online for a product to buy
Which one gives out more information about yourself?
-
It’s another untapped market they can monopolize. (Or just run at a loss because investor’s are happy with another imaginary pot of gold at the end of another rainbow.)
Wait till they learn about the environmental impacts of the oil industry, or the plastic industry.
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.
DDG has also gotten much worse since the introduction of AI features.
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.
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.
If only Google had a working search engine before AI
Yes, but now we can get much worse results and three pages of ads for ten times the energy cost. Capitalism at its finest.
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.
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…
I would love to see an AI make an ANSYS model that isn’t shit. They might be able to make cute pictures, but when it comes to making models for CFD or FEA, AI is a complete waste of time.
energy for a solution in search of a problem,
Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
Ah yes the classic it is useless and here is a use for it logic.
I take it you haven’t had to go through an AI chat bot for support before huh
I have and don’t see the relevance. The argument is that it is useless and then mentions a use case. If you want to say it’s crap I won’t argue the point but you can’t say X and ~X.
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
Tell that to my wallet. I hold a little crypto and it’s down over 50%
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
There’s a sucker born every minute
I switched to Kagi like 6 months ago and I still love it. Almost never have to go back to google except for maps.
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.
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.
Googles tpu can’t handle llm’s lol. What do you mean “exactly”?
In fact, Gemini was trained on, and is served, using TPUs.
Google said its TPUs allow Gemini to run “significantly faster” than earlier, less-capable models.
Did you think Google’s only TPUs are the ones in the Pixel phones, and didn’t know that they have server TPUs?
I’m pretty sure Google uses their TPU chips
The Coral ones? They don’t have nearly enough RAM to handle LLMs. They only support small Tensorflow Lite models.
They might have some custom-made non-public chips though - a lot of the big tech companies are working on that.
instead of a regular GPU
I wouldn’t call them regular GPUs… AI use cases often use products like the Nvidia H100, which are specifically designed for AI. They don’t have any video output ports.
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.
Yeah they’re pretty impressive for some at home stuff and they’re not even that costly.
The Coral is fantastic for use cases that don’t need large models. Object recognition for security cameras (using Blue Iris or Frigate) is a common use case, but you can also do things like object tracking (track where individual objects move in a video), pose estimation, keyphrase detection, sound classification, and more.
It runs Tensorflow Lite, so you can also build your own models.
Pretty good for a $25 device!
I would point out that Google has been “carbon neutral” with it’s data centers for quite some time, unlike others who still rape the environment ahem AWS.
carbon neutral is when you don’t emit it in the first place, not by paying someone else to promise to make up for it later.
Carbon offsets? Yes indeed. The easiest, most useless way to reach carbon neutral.
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.
As a buzzword or whatever this is leagues worse than “agile”, which I already loathed the overuse/integration of.
Before AI it was IoT. Nobody asked for an Internet connected toaster or fridge…
I always felt like I was alone in this thinking. I think anyone with a bit of a security mindset don’t want everything connected, besides it makes them more expensive and easier to break.
It definitely has to walk in the desert for a while. I know multiple people who like it for some stuff. Like cameras and managing air conditioning.
