r/google • u/ControlCAD • 2d ago

Google says it dropped the energy cost of AI queries by 33x in one year | The company claims that a text query now burns the equivalent of 9 seconds of TV.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-says-it-dropped-the-energy-cost-of-ai-queries-by-33x-in-one-year/
169 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

123

u/homezlice 2d ago

In a regular world people would celebrate this. In our fucked up reality the immediate response is “Google is lying”.  Google really does commit to and deliver these kinds of improvements. Wish we lived in a world where trust wasn’t just an assertion. 

22

u/HaMMeReD 2d ago

These numbers are actually completely expected though, if anything on the low end of the spectrum.

But people will parrot "AI wastes energy" non-stop.

https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report

"the inference cost for a system performing at the level of GPT-3.5 dropped over 280-fold between November 2022 and October 2024. At the hardware level, costs have declined by 30% annually, while energy efficiency has improved by 40% each year"

1

u/taintedmask 2d ago

I think the majority of the cost is the training, not inference though.

-2

u/NaFo_Operator 2d ago

then read this https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

7

u/didyousayboop 2d ago

Does this MIT Technology Review article actually give an estimate on how much electricity the most popular AI models use? I didn't read it all, but it seems like they're saying they don't know.

-2

u/NaFo_Operator 2d ago

it does

6

u/didyousayboop 2d ago

Sure, but these numbers are based on open source/open weights models. They note:

There is a significant caveat to this math. These numbers cannot serve as a proxy for how much energy is required to power something like ChatGPT 4o. We don’t know how many parameters are in OpenAI’s newest models, how many of those parameters are used for different model architectures, or which data centers are used and how OpenAI may distribute requests across all these systems.

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u/NaFo_Operator 2d ago

energy consumption will only grow and it will do so exponentially at one point you will hit a limit on how well you can optimize and its already been said that ai has plateaued on efficiency

3

u/didyousayboop 2d ago

Based on what source? The Ars Technica article linked in the OP said that energy usage per query for Google's AI Overview decreased 97% from 2024 to 2025. Do you have a source that contradicts that?

-2

u/NaFo_Operator 2d ago

again why do you google puts out these claims? they have to say this , or they will be the first to feel the bust https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electricity-demand-from-data-centres-while-offering-the-potential-to-transform-how-the-energy-sector-works

stop nitpicking the date of publication it means nothing, next week musk the idiot will claim his grok runs on smiles and ketamine and you'll eat it up

3

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

-1

u/NaFo_Operator 1d ago

read the damn report instead of shilling bs. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

you need to learn basic physics and how computers function, just because a company that has the most to lose if people stop using ai is trying to pull wool over gullible eyes doesnt mean they can break the laws of physics, btw ai has already plateaued

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

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-8

u/meltbox 2d ago

At a hardware level power doesn’t decrease 40% a year. It makes no sense.

There aren’t really architectural improvements in these wide and slow designs vs say x86 and the process improvements aren’t that rapid. Maybe historically this used to be true.

8

u/MyFeetLookLikeHands 2d ago

i hear you but also to be real: google did this to save money

3

u/AbdullahMRiad 1d ago

why wouldn't they?

0

u/MyFeetLookLikeHands 1d ago

idk you tell me

1

u/turbo_dude 2d ago

I believe them, but given how more people are using it more, it’s like finding bigger buckets to bail out the Titanic. 

The grid will collapse at some point because someone did a query about “best pizza cheese”

-1

u/Deep90 2d ago

Lack of trust is earned by betraying it.

4

u/sbenfsonwFFiF 2d ago

Except people often imagine or make up instances of “betrayal” when it really isn’t

-6

u/Deep90 2d ago

Which again is earned via actual betrayal.

If Google (or any company) wants credit for the truth, it starts with bettering the reputation they made for themselves.

2

u/sbenfsonwFFiF 2d ago

At this point, people who believe they’re lying won’t change their opinion. If they see positive news, they just go fake news. If they see negative news, they reinforce their existing opinion

-2

u/NaFo_Operator 2d ago

because its bullshit read this https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

of course a company that stands to lose billions will try to say it not bad

8

u/Low_Coconut_7642 2d ago

Not sure either see the point in sharing a 3 month old article when Google is talking about their CURRENT iteration of Gemini

-1

u/NaFo_Operator 2d ago

lol as usual another shill dickriding something .... why do you think google says that because they know they're about to lose billions when the bubble busts.... these companies need to come out with these claims so the gullible morons keep sinking money into them

-28

u/Actual__Wizard 2d ago edited 2d ago

Google really does commit to and deliver these kinds of improvements.

That's total BS... They passed the cost savings on to absolutely zero of the customers and users... How do you not understand how cost cutting works? They scam people into a product at one price point and then they cut the cost of it to nothing... It's a bait and switch scam... Which is unfortunately legal right now because there's no effective regulation against the scamtech companies.

Their AI is wrapped into totally unnecessary moat tech BS that serves no purpose at all, what so ever, other than to obfuscate the data they trained on. So, they're clearly doing everything in their power to waste energy while they lie about it.

6

u/VanillaLifestyle 2d ago

Username does not check out

5

u/squidgytree 2d ago

They scam people into a product at one price point and then they cut the cost of it to nothing... It's a bait and switch scam

Are you saying that customers willingly opted into a service at a price point and then Google scammed them by.... making money through efficiencies?

What did they switch exactly?

-4

u/Actual__Wizard 1d ago edited 1d ago

Are you saying that customers willingly opted into a service at a price point and then Google scammed them by.... making money through efficiencies?

Yes absolutely, it's not the same product, it's a bait and switch scam. They're paying for some "supposedly extremely inefficient AI algo do be involved in the operation of some expensive computer hardware to generate AI like functionality." So, they hooked people in at some ultra high price point, then they swapped the algos, and now they're just straight up scamming people.

Welcome to scamtech... There's no effective regulation, so they're just going to scam people all day long... That's exactly why Google has to broken up, they're just ripping people off all day long... They scammed every single one of their advertising customers... Every single one of them and they're going to do the exact same thing to every single one of their AI customers.

Then you're probably wondering, why are consumer product prices going up? Well, one of the reasons it's because your boss has the option of getting scammed by Google or getting scammed by Meta when they need acquire customers with digital ads, so, scamtech is effectively taxing you. Consumers ultimately pay the entire bill to these companies, who are being badly scammed by scamtech.

A bunch of fascists illegally consolidated all of the advertising networks, so the entire global marketplace and business world is totally broken, because it's impossible to form competition, because we're all being scammed by scam tech.

Who do you think is paying for their data centers? You are. They just manipulated their business in a way where that's hard you to figure out. Consumers pay Google's bills... It's like a tax on the entire country and they can set the rate whatever the F they want and scam their customers a million different ways, like as an example: By selling them click fraud, exactly like they've been doing for over two decades now. Or pushing their results down in their search product after they spent tons of money on it.

10

u/Overlord1317 2d ago

How much did Tesla go up on this news?

4

u/botticellispillman 2d ago

I would see this as a significant development. The claim is kind of a testament to the rapid pace of innovation in making AI more sustainable. This is a important step in addressing the the concerns about the environmental impact of the AI boom.

4

u/Mister__Mediocre 2d ago

Anyone who's paying attention knows that this is to be expected. Large models get sparsified to smaller ones over time as people figure out which components were unnecessary and which ones can be optimized.

1

u/Robot_Haus 1d ago

I bet they would save more if they didn't shoehorn AI into everything.

-23

u/redActarus 2d ago

Google is ok destroying the internet and the environment if it thinks its a self benefit. 🇺🇸🤡