In early February, first Google, then Microsoft, announced major overhauls to their search engines. Both tech giants have spent big on building or buying generative AI tools, which use large language models to understand and respond to complex questions. Now they are trying to integrate them into search, hoping they’ll give users a richer, more accurate experience. The Chinese search company Baidu has announced it will follow suit.
But the excitement over these new tools could be concealing a dirty secret. The race to build high-performance, AI-powered search engines is likely to require a dramatic rise in computing power, and with it a massive increase in the amount of energy that tech companies
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