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0 pointsjstummbillig3mo ago0 comments

Are you okay? You ventured 100x and that's wrong. What would you know about the last time I checked was, and in what context exactly? Anyway, good job on doing what I suggest you do, I guess.

The reason why it all rounds to 0 is that the google search will not give you an answer. It gives you a list of web pages, that you then need to visit (often times more than just one of them) generating more requests, and, more importantly, it will ask more of your time, the human, whose cumulative energy expenditure to be able to ask to be begin with is quite significant – and that you then will have not to spend on other things that a LLM is not able to do for you.

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oblio3mo ago

You condescendingly said, sorry, you "ventured" 0x usage, by claiming: "use Gemini to check yourself that the difference is basically 0". Well, I did take you up on that, and even Gemini doesn't agree with you.

Yes, Google Search is raw info. Yes, Google Search quality is degrading currently.

But Gemini can also hallucinate. And its answers can just be flat out wrong because it comes from the same raw data (yes, it has cross checks and it "thinks", but it's far from infallible).

Also, the comparison of human energy usage with GenAI energy usage is super ridiculous :-)))

Animal intelligence (including human intelligence) is one of the most energy efficient things on this planet, honed by billions years of cut throat (literally!) evolution. You can argue about time "wasted" analysing search results (which BTW, generally makes us smarter and better informed...), but energy-wise, the brain of the average human uses as much energy as the average incandescent light bulb to provide general intelligence (and it does 100 other things at the same time).

jstummbilligOP3mo ago

Ah, we are in "making up quotes territory, by putting quotation marks around the things someone else said, only not really". Classy.

Talking about "condescending":

> super ridiculous :-)))

It's not the energy efficient animal intelligence that got us here, but a lot of completely inefficient human years to begin with, first to keep us alive and then to give us primary and advanced education and our first experiences to become somewhat productive human beings. This is the capex of making a human, and it's significant – specially since we will soon die.

This capex exists in LLMs but rounds to zero, because one model will be used for +quadrillions of tokens. In you or me however, it does not round to zero, because the number of tokens we produce round to zero. To compete on productivity, the tokens we have produce therefore need to be vastly better. If you think you are doing the smart thing by using them on compiling Google searches you are simply bad at math.

lokar3mo ago

Serving a request for (often mostly static) content like that uses a tiny tiny amount of energy.

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