No one asked for this AI search bullshit, Google. Not only The response generated by the AI is clearly worse than usualthey are infringe intellectual property rights, killing traditional mediaAnd-Thanks to the new one Jacobin report now we know—absorbs a lot of electricity in the process. Powered by artificial intelligence search engine is a completely bad ideaAnd The whole thing must be stopped as quickly as humanly possible. Google AI Overview feature has only been in operation for two monthsBut it has caused a lot of harm and will only continue to get worse.
As it turns out, these AI search results require about 10 times as much energy to power them as a traditional Google search. According to research firm Digiconomist, adding AI-generated answers to all Google searches could reach the energy usage of the entire country of Ireland. Each search requires three watts of power, which at first glance doesn’t seem like much. That’s more or less the amount of electricity an LED light bulb in your house would use if you left it on for an hour.
The problem comes when you consider how many Google searches are performed in a day. According to Statista, Google will average 8.5 billion searches per day by 2023, or 98,379 searches per second. If each AI-generated search requires 3 watt-hours of electricity, that usage is 295,138.88 watt-hours or 295.14 kilowatt-hours. The average electric car sold in 2023 has a 40 kilowatt-hour battery on board, meaning the amount of electricity the AI searches for uses in one second could be used to power about 7.5 cars average electricity.
If your brain wants a bigger number, it’s 442.7 EV charges per minute, 26,562.5 EV charges per hour, or 637,500 EV charges per day. And it’s worth mentioning, these numbers only account for Google’s power usage related to AI-generated search results. AI and Large Language Models consume a lot of energy and have been used for a shit ton of things so far this decade.
Thank God we’re all turning off the air conditioning, cycling or walking instead of driving, and buying high-performance appliances so our energy usage is low enough for terrible search robots. of Google can be used instead.
