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Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by jeffbee on Thursday August 21, 2025 @10:52AM (#44973538)
> the takeaway is that ordinary Google searching is also quite energy-intense.

A related takeaway should be that machine inference is pervasive and has been for years, and that defining "AI" to mean just chatbots is to ignore most of the iceberg.

Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by gcr on Thursday August 21, 2025 @11:16AM (#44973847)
I'd still love to see a report that accurately captures training cost. Today's report[1] notably excludes training cost.

Not just "one training run," but the cost of a thousand AI engineers starting failing runs to get to that one deployed model.

1: Link to Google's tech report: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi... "We leave the measurement of AI model training to future work."

Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by xnx on Thursday August 21, 2025 @11:40AM (#44974151)
> I'd still love to see a report that accurately captures training cost. Today's report[1] notably excludes training cost.

From 2022, so possibly out of date: "ML training and inference are only 10%–15% of Google’s total energy use for each of the last three years, each year split ⅗ for inference and ⅖ for training." That's probably close enough to estimate 50/50, or the full energy cost to deliver an AI result is double the inference energy.

https://research.google/blog/good-news-about-the-carbon-foot...

Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by jeffbee on Thursday August 21, 2025 @11:47AM (#44974250)
It still kills me, every time, that the title embedded in the metadata of that original PDF is "Revamped Happy CO2e Paper".
Re:In a first, Google has released data on how much energy a... by gcr on Thursday August 21, 2025 @01:26PM (#44975541)
My gosh you're right! The paper in question is https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.05149, "The Carbon Footprint of Machine Learning Training Will Plateau, Then Shrink"