AI-generated answers to conventional search queries dramatically increase the energy consumption. By our estimates, energy demand increase by 60-70 times. This is a based on an updated estimate of energy consumption for conventional search and recent work on the energy demand of queries to the BLOOM model, a 176B parameter model, and OpenAI's GPT-3, which is of similar complexity.
@article{arxiv.2407.16894,
title = {Estimating the Increase in Emissions caused by AI-augmented Search},
author = {Wim Vanderbauwhede},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.16894},
year = {2025}
}