Estimating the Increase in Emissions caused by AI-augmented Search
arXiv:2407.16894v23 citations
Originality Synthesis-oriented
AI Analysis
This highlights a significant environmental impact problem for AI users and developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing energy estimates.
The paper estimates that AI-augmented search queries increase energy consumption by 60-70 times compared to conventional search, based on updated energy data for search and large models like BLOOM and GPT-3.
AI-generated answers to conventional search queries dramatically increase the energy consumption. By our estimates, energy demand increase by 60-70 times. This is a based on an updated estimate of energy consumption for conventional search and recent work on the energy demand of queries to the BLOOM model, a 176B parameter model, and OpenAI's GPT-3, which is of similar complexity.