What Do Google’s AI Answers Cost the Environment?
Google is bringing AI answers to a billion people this year, but generative AI requires much more energy than traditional keyword searches
What medications cure headaches? Should you kill cicadas? If you Google these questions in the U.S., answers may pop up directly at top of the results page—products of “AI Overviews,” the latest artificial intelligence offerings from the search engine giant. Google, which handles more than 90 percent of Internet searches worldwide, has promised to bring this feature to one billion people by the end of 2024. Other tech companies may follow suit; Microsoft’s search engine Bing has also introduced a similar AI option.
Gemini, Google’s family of large language models, generates the text found in AI Overviews. These systems are powerful but not flawless. In the weeks since the feature’s debut, it has recommended gluing cheese to pizza, changing a car’s blinker fluid and eating chicken cooked to only 102 degrees Fahrenheit. But these early flubs, which Google chalked up to misinterpretations or a lack of data, have so far overshadowed another possible drawback: the financial and environmental cost of AI search. Embedding generative AI in such a widely used application is likely to deepen the tech sector’s hunger for fossil fuels and water.
When compared to traditional search engines, AI uses “orders of magnitude more energy,” says Sasha Luccioni of the AI research company Hugging Face, who studies how these technologies impact the environment. “It just makes sense, right?” While a mundane search query finds existing data from the Internet, she says, applications like AI Overviews must create entirely new information; Luccioni’s team has estimated it costs about 30 times as much energy to generate text versus simply extracting it from a source.
