𝗔𝗜 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗸𝘀 𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆

A couple of stats I’ve read recently about AI are:
– SGE search results cost Google 100x more than a normal search (SGE is the AI driven search option that gives people natural language answers to their questions)
– each AI image costs the same energy as charging your mobile phone (a text answer is 32 times cheaper)
– AI is scheduled to consumer the amount of energy of a Netherlands/Argentina by 2027

These stats are all great to drop into day-to-day conversation to seem smarter (don’t worry I intend to do just that 😁).

I’m not waving the green flag on this, it’s also noteworthy that the majority of the energy consumption comes from the training part of the process. Some implications:
– Google won’t make SGE standard until it can save a lot of costs on this (it’s not feasible to increase your costs by 100 times). So your search rankings are safe, for now…
– AI is at the beginning of it’s evolution, we’ll hopefully see some major optimisations in terms of power as it develops (especially in image creation). I’d love to see the calculations of value created vs usage, but I don’t think that’s possible to work out.


Interesting times!
(I apologise I charged the equivalent of 16 phones for image for this post)