Estimating the Increase in Emissions caused by AI-augmented Search

Abstract--AI-generated answers to conventional search queries dramatically increase the energy consumption. This is a based on an updated estimate of energy consumption for conventional search and recent work on the energy demand of queries to the BLOOM model, a 176B parameter model, and OpenAI's GPT -3, which is of similar complexity. The new trend in search engines, to provide an AI-generated answer to the search query, has a considerable impact on the energy consumption and therefore CO2 emissions per query. To illustrate the impact of AI augmented search queries more clearly, I compare the energy consumption and emission of a query to Google's BLOOM model with that of a conventional Google search-style query. If all search queries are replac ed by AI-augmented queries, what does that mean for energy consumption and emissions?