Comment by 0xbadcafebee
21 hours ago
Talk about a nothing burger. "OOh they downloaded 4GB!" You mean 30 minutes of Netflix? The carbon emissions thing apparently isn't a big deal since the author says the browser's AI use is cloud based anyway, and offloading AI compute from the DC to the browser isn't really increasing carbon is it? Reads like another AI doomer trying to find something to get angry about.
>offloading AI compute from the DC to the browser isn't really increasing carbon is it?
That is actually an interesting question. I would think that any given amount of processing is at least slightly more efficient when running on large-scale cloud hardware, but I have no idea whether it's a few percent or 75%. There's also some overhead, so maybe there's no gain for smaller jobs.
Try to look outside your bubble. Millions of people still have monthly quotas on their internet plan, and 4GB can be a big chunk of it (possibly over all of it, in some cases).
Google should have asked.