this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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211
Ecosia plants 200 million trees (blog.ecosia.org)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

They integrated AI chat which is using OpenAI technology. So they're paying for ChatGPT API instead of spending this money on trees? And doesn't running generative AI consume a lot of electricity?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

We have estimated the carbon footprint of our AI chatbot and according to our first estimates it does not significantly increase the overall carbon footprint of Ecosia. The estimate takes into account that Ecosia searches are already 200% carbon negative,as we produce twice as much energy as is consumed by our search engine. We are currently working with two universities to refine our carbon footprint assessment.

Unfortunately the more important issue is that the leading language AI model providers are still not transparent about the energy consumption of their models, so without this clarity we can only make rough estimations of our impact. We will continue to monitor our energy usage and urge leading AI companies to do the same and be transparent about their impact.

(https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/534-ecosia-chat-ai)

I am not against it. I don't want to miss out on AI to support this search engine. It's quite helpful to me, and I assume many others. I think this search engine should compete with other search engines so that more users use it. I am already a fan of their Ecosia Chat; the interface is fast and the responses are even faster. Bing Chat is just awful; it's slow both in terms of interface and text generation

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