you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 50 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

AI overview uses around 20 times more energy than regular searches.

It's absolutely batshit crazy that most search engine put it on by default just for it to summarize a wiki page 90% of the time. It's like we're collectively pushing for a mass extinction.

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 30 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    What's even crazier is for a lot of things we already had a quick result overview. Like if you wanted the definition of a word. For a long time it was the case that you could just "define socks" and you'd get a widget at the top with the definition. Why would you replace that with AI, and have an AI process that request every single time someone wants to define socks instead of just keeping the old widget!?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 19 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Indeed.

    I'm pretty sure a good percentage of the searches are also just people typing the name of the website they want to access in the search bar. They don't want any information, just a link. All these searches now consume a massive amout of energy for basically nothing.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I sure would hope that those AI overviews are cached. Querying an LLMs for every repeated search sounds very wasteful

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment