Comment by jjani

>It's very concerning that you can just make shit up on HN and be the top comment as long as it's to bash Google.

Off topic. I wanted to say somewhat counterintuitively I often upvote / submit things I disagree with and dont downvote it as long as sub comments offer a good counter argument or explanation.

Sometimes being top just meant that is what most people are thinking, and it being wrong and corrected is precisely why I upvote it and wish it stayed on top so others can learn.

> make shit up on HN and be the top comment as long as it's to bash Google.

I don’t think that’s fair. Same would’ve happened if it were Microsoft, or Apple, or Amazon. By now we’re all used to (and tired) of these tech giants lying to us and being generally shitty. Additionally, for decades we haven’t been able to trust reports from big companies which say “everything is fine, really” when they publish it themselves, about themselves, contradicting the general wisdom of something bad they’ve been doing. Put those together and you have the perfect combination; we’re primed to believe they’re trying to deceive us again, because that’s what happens most of the time. It has nothing to do with it being Google, they just happened to be the target this time.

sure, but the issue is if you make the model 30x more efficient, but you use it 300x more often (mostly for stuff nobody wants), it's still a net loss

- The report doesn't name any Gemini models at all, only competitors'. Wonder why that is? If the models got so much more efficient, they'd be eager to show this.

- The report doesn't name any averages (means), only medians. Why oh why would they be doing this, when all other marketing pieces always use the average because outside of HN 99% of Joes on the street have no idea what a median is/how it differs from the mean? The average is much more relevant here when "measuring the environmental impact of AI inference".

- The report doesn't define what any of the terms "Gemini Apps", "the Gemini AI assistant" or "Gemini Apps text prompt" concretely mean

I’ve been covering tech for 20 years. No, it wasn’t always like that. There was a sincere mutual respect between the companies and the media industry that I don’t see anymore. Both sides have their fault, but you know it’s not media that huperscaled and created gazillionaires by the score. Also, software is way more bendable to the emperors’ whims, and Google has become particularly hypocritical in the way it publicly represent itself.

Unless marketing blogs from any company specifically say what model they are talking about, we should always assume they're hiding/conflating/mislabeling/misleading in every way possible. This is corporate media literacy 101.

The burden of proof is on Google here. If they've reduced gemini 2.5 energy use by 33x, they need to state that clearly. Otherwise a we should assume they're fudging the numbers, for example:

A) they've chosen one particular tiny model for this number

or

B) it's a median across all models including the tiny one they use for all search queries

EDIT: I've read over the report and it's B) as far as I can see

Without more info, any other reading of this is a failing on the reader's part, or wishful thinking if they want to feel good about their AI usage.

We should also be ready to change these assumptions if Google or another reputable party does confirm this applies to large models like Gemini 2.5, but should assume the least impressive possible reading until that missing info arrives.

Even more useful info would be how much electricity Google uses per month, and whether that has gone down or continued to grow in the period following this announcement. Because total energy use across their whole AI product range, including training, is the only number that really matters.