Comment by motorest

> 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".