64
Google Is Really, Really Thirsty
(gizmodo.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is what I was wondering when the tech media was saying "ChatGPT, the Google killer! Google is threatened by ChatGPT replacing Google search!!" a couple of months ago. One, it doesn't seem like they're comparable products for most uses. But also, what about energy usage? It's a hell of a lot more intensive to spin up an AI instance to generate paragraphs on the fly than query a database and print out a bunch of links to existing web pages. Also, horribly inefficient to generate new text every single time for whatever someone writes.
Cached answers incoming...
ChatGPT, the user-facing website, is not comparable to google, but the technology itself is directly comparable. I am using Google's own brand of chatbot-in-search (not bard, but probably is bard in the background) and it really does a good job taking the information from the top couple search results and compiling it together in one place for me to get the answer to my question. It seems (seems) less likely to hallucinate since it seems to be pulling information specifically from the search results; I obviously don't accept what it outputs without clicking through to the source websites, but I could see that becoming unnecessary in the future, since so far I haven't seen anything misrepresented or made up.
It's like Google's thing where they pull short answers to questions from popular websites (like wikipedia) but dialed to 11.