Comment by benreesman

I'm on record as pretty stridently anti-AI Hype Bullshit (I was calling Altman a criminal back when that had real-world consequences, check the history).

But this is in the vanishing minority of frontpage AI threads where it's a really interesting concersation about quantifiable things: what quantization, what engagement metrics, what NDGC on downstream IR. People are complaining they gamed the number: that's an improvement! Normally they just lie. This is amenable to analysis and frankly an interesting one.

If it were up to me they'd flat regex ban "llm" and "ai" on HN, thats about the right ROC. But if we're going to have it? I'll take this over "How AI Saved My Vibecode Startup From Vibe Coding".

> People are complaining they gamed the number: that's an improvement!

Is it, though?

There's a post in this discussion claiming that Google rolled out AI summaries on all of their search queries. This means they greatly increased the number of queries by triggering queries at each Google search. These are unsolicited queries that users do not send by themselves or want.

Then the post claims each of these unsolicited queries are executed using small models that are cheaper to run.

The post asserts these unsolicited queries represent half of the queries.

Google's claims are that now the median cost of their queries is lower. The post asserts around half of Google's AI queries are not requested by users and instead forced upon them with searches.

To me, what this spells is the exact opposite of a improvement. It's waste that is not requested by anyone and adds no value. It's just waste.

Consequently, if Google pulled the plug on these queries then the would reduce their total query count by around 50%. How much energy and carbon emissions would that save? Well, if you pick up that value and flip it over to show how much is being wasted, that's your "improvement".