That said, it's still worth calling out that their Gemini answers use drastically more resources whenever they are run and cached. We'd have to know Google's caching rules and the average frequency of cache hits to know how much it actually reduces the Gemini resource usage.
If you go on to read the paper, you discover this is an outright lie. These figures are for training, not usage.
Even compared to regular indexing, it's not exactly apples to apples. You still have to go through a dozen or more links and manually read them and filter out spam before getting a good idea.
It's be fairer to compare the LLM summary to some other scraper and summarization system.
That said Jevons Paradox seems to be a hardcoded feature of the physical underpinnings of modern society, so we're probably headed for some sort of "busybody" machine world with AI's everywhere that are highly efficient but also highly wasteful.
Very few modern process so far has lead to more efficient / scarcer use of earths resources, well mirrored in the ever increasing layers of abstraction in computing where a supercomputer at home can have trouble rendering a basic desktop interface without latency these days.
I think that's not true. The amount of material needed to make a computer, and the power to drive it, has gone down incredibly since valve-based, room-sized computers, alongside the simultaneous massive increase in power.
This is such an embarrassment. It is lunacy that a modern desktop OS feels more sluggish than a late 90s box.
I wonder how much of the perceived lag in modern OSes would be mitigated by a buzzing chunking HD or floppy though. Like you could hear the computer working.
Scarcer? Probably right. More efficient? That seems very, very wrong. We're constantly looking for more efficient ways of doing and building things - if you'd like to frame this in a cynical way, look at it like this: businesses/industries are always looking to reduce costs. Sometimes this is done by firing thousands of people, sometimes this is by using more efficient materials/processes.
Could you list some of these processes you are referring to?
Finally there are advantages of scale to centralizing resources that will create high degree of incentive and specialization to drive down cost and power consumption at these data centers.
It’s just gonna be insane until the near term uncertainty is ironed out.
There's always the end case where no search tools offer LLM-free results, but even then a person can still just not use search if they really care.
Its just about informed consent in my book.
However you can have an architecture that deals with the error well enough to make useful estimates. Artificial and biological neural networks for instance.
Some neuromorphic chips use analog components for storage and processing. Some people are trying to go the other way around and grow biological neurons in a chip (indeed, very low power, though maybe more effort to feed it nutrients).
Guilt tripping on totally arbitrary things just isn't going to work.
We already have a mechanism for managing scarce resources, it's called price, so let's just use it.
Consumers just need to know how it actually works, at least at the most basic level of what the costs are. From there either consumers don't care or stop using it. Do we really need the government forcing more morals on us through another sin tax?
That worrying about whether doing bog standard everyday activities like turning on a computer and running a program is "bad" is just silly and even if it did work would cause mass anxiety.
It's not a sin tax, it's a tax on causing externalities. There is no need for an AI tax because AI is not in and of itself a thing which causes environmental damage.
Well, unless it goes Skynet, but I'm considering that out of scope.
Setting the rate is more complex, but anything at all would be a start.
