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!
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.
I’d rather we give up AI than give up meat or flying. I am not taking a ship half way across the world.
You do you. But other people may have other priorities.
Anyway, how many times have an user to use an AI to even come close to a single commercial plate through the Atlantic? It may be a freaking lot.
You giving away AI, or even forcing all humandkind to do so, might as well do nothing as far as climate change is concerned.
I still believe there are other priorities over one trip every couple of years. Flight is one of the greatest achievements of humanity and I firmly believe it is important to visit other cultures.
It’s great if you can afford it. If you can afford to fly even a couple times a year you’re pretty privileged. I can’t, and I’m still privileged.
Its not even hidden, people just give zero fucks about how their magical rectangle works and get mad if you try to tell them.
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’s certainly very convenient for programmed obsolescence.
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.
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.
The results used to be better too. AI just produces junk faster.
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 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 offsets? Yes indeed. The easiest, most useless way to reach carbon neutral.
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.
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?
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.
