Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemomarx | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this why transit advocates try to reduce the need for owning a car though?

I'm thinking a really good search engine would not make you reach for ai as often and so could be eco friendly that way

There are fundamental reasons public transit is always more efficient than private cars. There's no fundamental reason a really good search engine is more efficient than an LLM or any other kind of AI.

The sheer amount of linear algebra number crunching vs some database lookups is monumental. I don’t see how an LLM could ever be as efficient as a search engine.

Search engines aren't just some database lookups, is the thing. There's actually quite a bit of linear alegbra involved in both, for page ranking especially

Anyways these sorts of comparisons make no sense to begin with, and quite obviously at the moment the worst actors cough xAI cough who are deploying massively polluting generators into residential neighborhoods are much worse than, say, Google Search

When I took linear algebra at uni in 2012, one of the examples to show practical applications in our text book was the PageRank algorithm!

Maybe because we all know that working search is better than an LLM hands down? What are you talking about? The only reason people go to LLMs instead of Google is because Google Search has been destroyed by Sundar Pichai.

This has to be satire. LLMs are a monumental jump on search engines.

Imagine a hypothetical search competition and you are given Google and I am given ChatGPT. I’ll win every single time.

Yes, the greenest browser is one that doesn’t use AI. They aren’t claiming they’ve built that though, just the greenest AI.

I don't use AI though. Are they going to put automatic AI responses on the SERP? That's less green than simply not having AI on the SERP. Giving me something I do not want is wasteful by definition.

I disagree. Without AI I might take 15 min to search for something in google that would have taken me a single prompt in ChatGPT. The energy used by my screen in those 15 minutes would be higher than the energy taken by that prompt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com