Google greenhouse gas emissions grow as it powers AI
AFP
July 3, 2024
Power hungry datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence are making it more challenging for tech giant's to meet goals of curbing greenhouse gas emissions from their operations - Copyright INDONESIAN PRESIDENTIAL PALACE/AFP Handout
Google, despite its goal of achieving net-zero emissions, is pumping out more greenhouse gas than before as it powers data centers needed to support artificial intelligence, the company said.
Google’s climate-changing emissions have increased 48 percent in the past five years, at odds with a touted goal of becoming carbon neutral for the sake of the planet, according to an annual environmental report released on Tuesday.
Total greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 were 13 percent higher than they were the prior year, primarily driven by increased data center energy consumption and its supply chain, the report stated.
The increase came even though Google has been ramping up use of solar and wind generated clean energy.
“In spite of the progress we’re making, we face significant challenges that we’re actively working through,” chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt and senior vice president Benedict Gomes said in the report.
“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment.”
Google is not alone in facing the challenge of feeding power-hungry AI data centers, while trying to curb creation of climate-changing greenhouse gas.
Microsoft said in its recent sustainability report that its greenhouse gas emissions last year were up 29 percent from 2020 as it continues “to invest in the infrastructure needed to advance new technologies.”
Microsoft and Google have been front runners in an AI race since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022.
AI has been a theme for the rivals in blockbuster earnings performances quarter after quarter.
Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft have each pledged to be carbon neutral by the end of this decade.
Microsoft has an added goal of being carbon-negative, taking climate-harming gas out of the air, by 2050.
Amazon, also an AI contender with its AWS cloud computing division, has said it is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2040.
“A sustainable future requires systems-level change, strong government policies, and new technologies,” Google said in its report.
“We’re committed to collaboration and playing our part, every step of the way.”
AFP
July 3, 2024
Power hungry datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence are making it more challenging for tech giant's to meet goals of curbing greenhouse gas emissions from their operations - Copyright INDONESIAN PRESIDENTIAL PALACE/AFP Handout
Google, despite its goal of achieving net-zero emissions, is pumping out more greenhouse gas than before as it powers data centers needed to support artificial intelligence, the company said.
Google’s climate-changing emissions have increased 48 percent in the past five years, at odds with a touted goal of becoming carbon neutral for the sake of the planet, according to an annual environmental report released on Tuesday.
Total greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 were 13 percent higher than they were the prior year, primarily driven by increased data center energy consumption and its supply chain, the report stated.
The increase came even though Google has been ramping up use of solar and wind generated clean energy.
“In spite of the progress we’re making, we face significant challenges that we’re actively working through,” chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt and senior vice president Benedict Gomes said in the report.
“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment.”
Google is not alone in facing the challenge of feeding power-hungry AI data centers, while trying to curb creation of climate-changing greenhouse gas.
Microsoft said in its recent sustainability report that its greenhouse gas emissions last year were up 29 percent from 2020 as it continues “to invest in the infrastructure needed to advance new technologies.”
Microsoft and Google have been front runners in an AI race since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022.
AI has been a theme for the rivals in blockbuster earnings performances quarter after quarter.
Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft have each pledged to be carbon neutral by the end of this decade.
Microsoft has an added goal of being carbon-negative, taking climate-harming gas out of the air, by 2050.
Amazon, also an AI contender with its AWS cloud computing division, has said it is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2040.
“A sustainable future requires systems-level change, strong government policies, and new technologies,” Google said in its report.
“We’re committed to collaboration and playing our part, every step of the way.”
By AFP
July 2, 2024
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. — © AFP Sajjad HUSSAIN
Joseph BOYLE
Google made major changes to its search algorithm and spam filters earlier this year to get rid of low-quality content — but the effects have proved devastating to some smaller websites.
Online businesses have been left considering layoffs and even site closures after Google’s massive upgrade in March and April caused catastrophic drops in traffic.
Gisele Navarro is one of the unlucky ones whose website got caught up in Google’s dragnet.
The 37-year-old Argentine runs the HouseFresh website with her husband, and they had been building a healthy niche in product reviews for air purifiers since 2020.
There were no ads, no product placements and no soft-pedalling — if a product was bad, the site’s reviewers would say so.
They earned commissions from clickthroughs to Amazon.
But Google’s update changed all of that.
“We found that we went from ranking number one — because we were one of the only people who had actually done a review — to not even showing up,” she told AFP.
HouseFresh used to get around 4,000 referrals from Google search a day, but this has since collapsed to around 200.
The dropoff in business has been so bad that Navarro said she had been advised to shutter the site and start over with a new domain name.
– Updates ‘helpful’ –
Underpinning the frustration for Navarro and many other sites is the lack of clarity over how Google ranks results.
Image: – © GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Anna Moneymaker
The US firm is notoriously secretive about its algorithms — so much so that an entire industry known as “search engine optimisation” has grown up trying to game the algorithm to get more clicks.
The latest update sent SEO experts into a tailspin, desperately trying to unpack why some sites were boosted and others getting downranked.
Google told AFP in an email that its update was designed specifically to give users “fewer results that feel made for search engines”.
“The only changes we launch are ones that our experiments have shown will meaningfully improve results for people. And we do believe that these updates have been helpful,” Google said.
Yet Navarro showed in a widely shared blog post in May that people searching for product reviews were increasingly being fed ads and content that appeared to be AI-generated or SEO-maximised.
– ‘Tough market’ –
Other material boosted by Google’s update included user-generated content from websites like Reddit and Quora.
Google defended this approach saying “people often want to learn from others’ experiences”, adding: “We conduct rigorous testing to ensure results are helpful and high quality.”
But staff at one European news website said their articles were now being routinely outranked by largely irrelevant content from Reddit.
The site publisher, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said referrals from Google had plummeted by between 20 to 30 percent since the update — and cutbacks would be inevitable.
“In an already tough market this is a serious problem for independent publishers like us,” they said.
All the businesses AFP talked to said they were now urgently seeking ways to avoid relying on Google search — whether by writing newsletters, making podcasts or finding other ways to attract audiences.
The boss of a fintech news outlet, who spoke to AFP anonymously fearing adverse effects on their business, said their competitors all employed SEO firms “to buy traffic”.
“We don’t do that but it’s getting harder to hold that position as those sites didn’t fall anywhere near as much as ours after this Google update,” they said.
Navarro, who has had to reduce her staff drastically, has pivoted to video reviews and newsletters to try to reconnect with her audience.
And despite her experience with Google, she remains an optimist about the web.
She has been heartened by the many messages of support, and an uptick in referrals from alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo.
“The entire knowledge of humankind is on the web — and that’s worth something,” she said.
“I don’t want to give up on it just because Google is broken.”
No comments:
Post a Comment