How Often Does Google AI Actually Generate A Response?

[Parmandur]

Who knows, but if you cuss in the search it will circumvent the AI result (like "how do I make a cussing burrito" will give you traditional search results).

 

[The Firebird]

The motivation for my question was about energy efficiency. Generating a new, unique result to every query with AI, no matter how simple and straightforward, seems like it could be horrifically energy inefficient.

Iirc it is about 5 times as much energy to generate an AI response than google search. More than search, but I don't recall hearing that search was an environmental disaster. I think the environmental issues with AI are more because of training and/or widespread adoption for other purposes moreso than adding it to google search.

 

[trappedslider]

The motivation for my question was about energy efficiency. Generating a new, unique result to every query with AI, no matter how simple and straightforward, seems like it could be horrifically energy inefficient.

“Median energy use per AI text prompt is approximately 0.24 Wh, comparable to only a few seconds of television viewing"

Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale

The transformative power of AI is undeniable - but as user adoption accelerates, so does the need to understand and mitigate the environmental impact of AI serving. However, no studies have measured AI serving environmental metrics in a production environment. This paper addresses this gap by...

arxiv.org

 

[Umbran]

“Median energy use per AI text prompt is approximately 0.24 Wh, comparable to only a few seconds of television viewing"

Sure. Be remember that we aren't really talking about one use.

A million text prompts become like 104 days of TV viewing.

And when there's more than a million people using it, and each person is using it over and over and over in a day, the aggregate isn't great.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think that's what it's intended to do, though in reality I find it is frequently inaccurate, and I've seen it have all correct search results, but the summary is some complete off-topic nonsense! So it seems like it must also be drawing from sources which aren't the shown results (indeed sometimes if you click the links it gives, those don't go to any front-page search results).

I am guessing the summary is going off of the user-created page summaries for each page, which are often pretty half-assed by a lot of sites, which would mean it's scraping lower quality data than the actual page (which is usually more complete and up to date).

 

[The Firebird]

Sure. Be remember that we aren't really talking about one use.

A million text prompts become like 104 days of TV viewing.

And when there's more than a million people using it, and each person is using it over and over and over in a day, the aggregate isn't great.

Isn't average TV use in the US like 3 hours a day? At 1 prompt = 5 seconds of TV viewing, you need 720 searches to match 1 hour.