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I'm not sure why they would report on the median prompt, and not the average, which would give a better sense of (well average) consumption in this case
by oulipo2 1y ago
I'm not sure why they would report on the median prompt, and not the average, which would give a better sense of (well average) consumption in this case
- sceptic123 1y agoMedian is _an_ average, are you wanting a mean consumption perhaps when you say average?
- Capricorn2481 1y agoWell first of all, you're implying this measures our consumption at all. But it's left completely vague what this is a median of. They said "A point-in-time analysis quantified the energy consumed per median Gemini App text-generation prompt, considering data from May 2025". Considering what data? All queries sent to Gemini? Real users? A select few? Test queries from Google? Does it include AI summaries of google searches? Because if the data includes stuff as simple as "How tall is Lee Pace," that is obviously going to bring the median query down, even if the top distribution is using many times more energy. But still, the median is not useful by itself. It tells us 50% of the queries measured were under 0.24Wh. It obviously obscures policy-relevant information to not include the mean, but it also obscures what I can do individually without more details on the data. Where am I on this median? It makes the most sense to provide the entire distribution and examples of data points.
- sceptic123 1y agoI'm not implying anything other than there's a tendency to lazy use of the word average
- klabb3 1y ago100%, and I say that as someone who often think average is misleading, but in this case it makes no sense to report median (unless you are working at Google and trying to chase tail usage). > I'm not sure why they would report on the median The why is an easier question. They probably picked the lower of the two numbers because it lies in their interest to state they are energy efficient.