6 ms·

Ecosia: The greenest AI is here

128 points by doener 11mo ago

Barathkanna 11mo ago
Looks interesting. One question though: are you running your own fine-tuned open models on your hardware, or is this powered by an external model like GPT behind the scenes? Curious how independent the stack really is.
- HelloUsername 11mo ago
  "Great question! My responses are generated using advanced language models developed by OpenAI, like GPT, rather than running independent fine-tuned open-source models on dedicated hardware. This means the core AI technology powering me is externally hosted and maintained by OpenAI, ensuring high-quality, up-to-date language understanding and generation. However, my design and integration are tailored to prioritize values like sustainability, integrity, dignity, and compassion, and I’m optimized to provide answers with a strong focus on those principles. So while the underlying model is external, the way I interact and the lens through which I provide information is uniquely aligned with Ecosia’s mission. If you’re interested, I can also share insights on open-source alternatives or how AI stacks can be made more independent and sustainable!"
  - binary132 11mo ago
    why would anyone downvote this?
- catlikesshrimp 11mo ago
  TFA "... which already powers AI Overviews and some of our search results. Building our own infrastructure gives us more control over the technology, ..." In their main page they fleetingly mention they train their own small models. I agree it's little info
- mstokholm 11mo ago
  > I’m based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 architecture, which is a proprietary large language model. It’s designed to understand and generate human-like text across many topics and tasks. While the underlying model itself isn’t open source, it’s widely used for applications requiring advanced natural language understanding and generation. If you want, I can share more about how it works or about alternatives in the AI landscape!
eulgro 11mo ago
The greenest AI is no AI though.
- stronglikedan 11mo ago
  you're better than that
arnaudsm 11mo ago
Running an LLM by default when I open your site is the most energy-consuming thing a computer can do, and the thing consumers hate the most in 2025.
- xzjis 11mo ago
  I love Kagi's implementation: by default it's disabled, you either have to add a question mark to the search, or click in the interface after searching to generate the summary.
  - alex1138 11mo ago
    Yeah and you can set an option to disable the ? initiator too
- conradev 11mo ago
  Your computer might use more energy displaying the results to you than the server does generating them. Especially in Chrome :) The server shares resources!
- observationist 11mo ago
  This is absurd. Training an AI is energy intensive but highly efficient. Running inference for a few hundred tokens, doing a search, stuff like that is a triviality. Each generated token takes the equivalent energy of the heat from burning ~.06 µL of gasoline per token. ~2 joules per token, including datacenter and hosting overhead. If you get up to massive million token prompts, it can get up to the 8-10 joules per token of output. Training runs around 17-20J per token. A liter of gasoline gets you 16,800,000 tokens for normal use cases. Caching and the various scaled up efficiency hacks and improvements get you into the thousands of tokens per joule for some use cases. For contrast, your desktop PC running idle uses around 350k joules per day. Your fridge uses 3 million joules per day. AI is such a relatively trivial use of resources that you caring about nearly any other problem, in the entire expanse of all available problems to care about, would be a better use of your time. AI is making resources allocated to computation and data processing much more efficient, and year over year, the relative intelligence per token generated, and the absolute energy cost per token generated, is getting far more efficient and relatively valuable. Find something meaningful to be upset at. AI is a dumb thing to be angry at.
Vinnl 11mo ago
Would be interesting to be a fly on the wall for their internal conversations. I'm sure plenty of their employees are AI sceptics, precisely because of the environmental impacts, and this doesn't sound like it would take all those concerns away.
monegator 11mo ago
greenest "AI" = no AI. NEEEEEXT
w4yai 11mo ago
[flagged]
- GaryBluto 11mo ago
  Will you be doing your part to help the environment by abstaining from all modern technology and living in a shed in the woods?
josefritzishere 11mo ago
Is there no browser I can use without this AI trash jammed into it?
- sph 11mo ago
  Lynx
- josefritzishere 11mo ago
  The AI bros keep minusing. I want you to remember this when the AI bubble pops next year.
- crabmusket 11mo ago
  Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/
- MrAlex94 11mo ago
  Waterfox, I’ve spent a good amount of time on scouring through the code looking at what to remove and the next release I’ve found some last remaining remnants to disable
- GuinansEyebrows 11mo ago
  i'm nervously waiting for apple to ruin safari :(
bcye 11mo ago
Reminder that LLMs only(?) consume energy on the order of a few seconds of Netflix[1]. [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2l https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2...
- belval 11mo ago
  Netflix spending 240Wh for 1h of content just does not pass the smell test for me. Today I can have ~8 people streaming from my Jellyfin instance which is a server that consumes about 35W, measured at the wall. That's ~5Wh per hour of content from me not even trying.
  - conradev 11mo ago
    They claim that streaming over WiFi to a single mobile device is 37W: Because phones are extremely energy efficient, data transmission accounts for nearly all the electricity consumption when streaming through 4G, especially at higher resolutions (Scenario D). Streaming an hour-long SD video through a phone on WiFi (Scenario C) uses just 0.037 kWh – 170 times less than the estimate from the Shift Project. They might be folding in wider internet energy usage? https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/carbon-footprint-netflix-video-streaming-climate-change/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/carbon-footprint-net...
  - vitus 11mo ago
    It's way more lopsided than your example would suggest. My understanding is that Netflix can stream 100 Gbps from a 100W server footprint (slide 17 of [0]). Even if you assume every stream is 4k and uses 25 Mbps, that's still thousands of streams. I would guess that the bulk of the power consumption from streaming video is probably from the end-user devices -- a backbone router might consume a couple of kilowatts of power, but it's also moving terabits of traffic. [0] https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf
  - ac29 11mo ago
    The 240W number is end to end, including the power usage of a TV. Its also the high end of the estimate of 120-240W
hkt 11mo ago
The greenest AI will be connected to district heat networks instead of being cooled with air or water. It isn't even faintly green when heat is treated as a byproduct instead of a co-benefit.
- weikju 11mo ago
  Use AI as power source to power the industry!!! Let them live in a virtual world
Insanity 11mo ago
People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true but it’s an apples to pears comparison. Clearly Ecosia is pushing for “people want AI” _and_ we want to make it more ecofriendly. Taking away features from users altogether is not the right answer. It’s like saying “cheapest car is no car”. It doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of “wanting a car”.
- oytis 11mo ago
  We don't have a problem of wanting AI though
  - doublerabbit 11mo ago
    We may when AI wants AI...
- nemomarx 11mo ago
  Isn't this why transit advocates try to reduce the need for owning a car though? I'm thinking a really good search engine would not make you reach for ai as often and so could be eco friendly that way
  - tybit 11mo ago
    Yes, the greenest browser is one that doesn’t use AI. They aren’t claiming they’ve built that though, just the greenest AI.
    - chongli 11mo ago
      I don't use AI though. Are they going to put automatic AI responses on the SERP? That's less green than simply not having AI on the SERP. Giving me something I do not want is wasteful by definition.
    - simianwords 11mo ago
      I disagree. Without AI I might take 15 min to search for something in google that would have taken me a single prompt in ChatGPT. The energy used by my screen in those 15 minutes would be higher than the energy taken by that prompt.
dom96 11mo ago
I haven't kept up to date with this, but last I heard we still aren't certain how much energy AI training/inference actually takes at the big AI companies (OpenAI/Anthropic). Have any of these companies shared this since? What's our closest estimates if not?
- JimDabell 11mo ago
  Google: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measuring-the-environmental-impact-of-ai-inference/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur... Mistral: https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environmental-standard-for-ai https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environ... OpenAI: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
barishnamazov 11mo ago
> As a not-for-profit company, we can afford to do things differently. AI Search uses smaller, more efficient models, and we avoid energy-heavy features like video generation altogether. I'm a bit confused -- do other search engines provide video generation? Mentioning that sounds too out of place to me. Am I missing something?
LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
I think it is more the greenwashiest AI
- xaldir 11mo ago
  It goes well with their greenwashing "search engine" (API to bing and google).
parapatelsukh 11mo ago
[dead]
Zambyte 11mo ago
My prompt: tell me about the new zig io interface Ecosia: > The Zig IO interface is associated with Zigbee, a specification for a suite of high-level communication protocols using low-power digital radios. It is often used in IoT (Internet of Things) applications for smart home devices, such as lights, sensors, and smart locks. The Zig IO interface typically allows for seamless communication between devices, enabling automation and remote control. > For specific details about the latest updates or features of the Zig IO interface, I recommend checking the official Zigbee Alliance website or relevant tech news sources for the most current information. If you're interested in sustainable technology or eco-friendly smart home solutions, feel free to ask! Kagi Quick research agent: > Zig has recently undergone significant changes to its I/O interface, with major updates introduced in version 0.15 and further enhancements planned for the upcoming 0.16.0 release. The new I/O system represents a comprehensive rework of the standard library's input/output handling, focusing on improved efficiency, clarity, and flexibility. > The most notable changes include a complete overhaul of the `std.Io.Reader` and `std.Io.Writer` interfaces, which were revamped in a mid-2025 development release as the first step in modernizing Zig's I/O capabilities [^2]. These interfaces in Zig 0.15.1 represent a significant improvement in both efficiency and code clarity, though they require slightly more boilerplate code [^5]. > A key architectural change is that the new I/O interface is non-generic and uses a virtual function table (vtable) for dispatching function calls to concrete implementations [^4]. This approach simplifies the interface while maintaining performance. The upcoming Zig 0.16.0 will introduce new async I/O primitives, building on this reworked foundation and eventually leading to the reintroduction of asynchronous programming capabilities [^1]. > These changes position Zig's I/O system for better performance and more flexible integration with different I/O backends, representing a significant step forward in the language's systems programming capabilities [^3]. [^1]: [Zig's New Async I/O (Text Version) - Andrew Kelley](https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-new-async-io-text-version.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-new-async-io-text-version.h...) (25%) [^2]: [Zig's new Writer - openmymind.net](https://www.openmymind.net/Zigs-New-Writer/ https://www.openmymind.net/Zigs-New-Writer/) (22%) [^3]: [I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface](https://www.openmymind.net/Im-Too-Dumb-For-Zigs-New-IO-Interface/ https://www.openmymind.net/Im-Too-Dumb-For-Zigs-New-IO-Inter...) (21%) [^4]: [Zig's New Async I/O | Loris Cro's Blog](https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-async-io/ https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-async-io/) (17%) [^5]: [Zig 0.15.1 I/O Overhaul: Understanding the New Reader/Writer ...](https://dev.to/bkataru/zig-0151-io-overhaul-understanding-the-new-readerwriter-interfaces-30oe https://dev.to/bkataru/zig-0151-io-overhaul-understanding-th...) (15%) The Ecosia AI does not seem to be grounded in search results. When using small models, this is essentially useless.
rl_shannon 11mo ago
What dumb bullshit! If you run out of ideas or positioning pivot to climate change as a lame excuse of not having enough resources - people or compute
benrutter 11mo ago
I'll be interested to see how this pkays with their actual users. As one myself, I don't object inherently to Ecosia providing AI search. I understand they need to stay competitive with other search. But I find how prominent / hard to avoid their AI search is, reeeeaaally annoying. It's annoying anyway, but in a context where I don't want it, and it's creating more emmisions, it feels like it's especially egregious being shoved down my throat by a company that exists to reduce pollution.
yapyap 11mo ago
why even do AI at all

128 points by doener 11mo ago

Looks interesting. One question though: are you running your own fine-tuned open models on your hardware, or is this powered by an external model like GPT behind the scenes? Curious how independent the stack really is.

HelloUsername 11mo ago
"Great question! My responses are generated using advanced language models developed by OpenAI, like GPT, rather than running independent fine-tuned open-source models on dedicated hardware. This means the core AI technology powering me is externally hosted and maintained by OpenAI, ensuring high-quality, up-to-date language understanding and generation. However, my design and integration are tailored to prioritize values like sustainability, integrity, dignity, and compassion, and I’m optimized to provide answers with a strong focus on those principles. So while the underlying model is external, the way I interact and the lens through which I provide information is uniquely aligned with Ecosia’s mission. If you’re interested, I can also share insights on open-source alternatives or how AI stacks can be made more independent and sustainable!"
- binary132 11mo ago
  why would anyone downvote this?
catlikesshrimp 11mo ago
TFA "... which already powers AI Overviews and some of our search results. Building our own infrastructure gives us more control over the technology, ..." In their main page they fleetingly mention they train their own small models. I agree it's little info
mstokholm 11mo ago
> I’m based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 architecture, which is a proprietary large language model. It’s designed to understand and generate human-like text across many topics and tasks. While the underlying model itself isn’t open source, it’s widely used for applications requiring advanced natural language understanding and generation. If you want, I can share more about how it works or about alternatives in the AI landscape!

eulgro 11mo ago

The greenest AI is no AI though.

stronglikedan 11mo ago
you're better than that

arnaudsm 11mo ago

Running an LLM by default when I open your site is the most energy-consuming thing a computer can do, and the thing consumers hate the most in 2025.

xzjis 11mo ago
I love Kagi's implementation: by default it's disabled, you either have to add a question mark to the search, or click in the interface after searching to generate the summary.
- alex1138 11mo ago
  Yeah and you can set an option to disable the ? initiator too
conradev 11mo ago
Your computer might use more energy displaying the results to you than the server does generating them. Especially in Chrome :) The server shares resources!
observationist 11mo ago
This is absurd. Training an AI is energy intensive but highly efficient. Running inference for a few hundred tokens, doing a search, stuff like that is a triviality. Each generated token takes the equivalent energy of the heat from burning ~.06 µL of gasoline per token. ~2 joules per token, including datacenter and hosting overhead. If you get up to massive million token prompts, it can get up to the 8-10 joules per token of output. Training runs around 17-20J per token. A liter of gasoline gets you 16,800,000 tokens for normal use cases. Caching and the various scaled up efficiency hacks and improvements get you into the thousands of tokens per joule for some use cases. For contrast, your desktop PC running idle uses around 350k joules per day. Your fridge uses 3 million joules per day. AI is such a relatively trivial use of resources that you caring about nearly any other problem, in the entire expanse of all available problems to care about, would be a better use of your time. AI is making resources allocated to computation and data processing much more efficient, and year over year, the relative intelligence per token generated, and the absolute energy cost per token generated, is getting far more efficient and relatively valuable. Find something meaningful to be upset at. AI is a dumb thing to be angry at.

Vinnl 11mo ago

Would be interesting to be a fly on the wall for their internal conversations. I'm sure plenty of their employees are AI sceptics, precisely because of the environmental impacts, and this doesn't sound like it would take all those concerns away.

monegator 11mo ago

greenest "AI" = no AI. NEEEEEXT

w4yai 11mo ago

[flagged]

GaryBluto 11mo ago
Will you be doing your part to help the environment by abstaining from all modern technology and living in a shed in the woods?

josefritzishere 11mo ago

Is there no browser I can use without this AI trash jammed into it?

sph 11mo ago
Lynx
josefritzishere 11mo ago
The AI bros keep minusing. I want you to remember this when the AI bubble pops next year.
crabmusket 11mo ago
Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/
MrAlex94 11mo ago
Waterfox, I’ve spent a good amount of time on scouring through the code looking at what to remove and the next release I’ve found some last remaining remnants to disable
GuinansEyebrows 11mo ago
i'm nervously waiting for apple to ruin safari :(

bcye 11mo ago

Reminder that LLMs only(?) consume energy on the order of a few seconds of Netflix[1]. [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2l https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2...

belval 11mo ago
Netflix spending 240Wh for 1h of content just does not pass the smell test for me. Today I can have ~8 people streaming from my Jellyfin instance which is a server that consumes about 35W, measured at the wall. That's ~5Wh per hour of content from me not even trying.
- conradev 11mo ago
  They claim that streaming over WiFi to a single mobile device is 37W: Because phones are extremely energy efficient, data transmission accounts for nearly all the electricity consumption when streaming through 4G, especially at higher resolutions (Scenario D). Streaming an hour-long SD video through a phone on WiFi (Scenario C) uses just 0.037 kWh – 170 times less than the estimate from the Shift Project. They might be folding in wider internet energy usage? https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/carbon-footprint-netflix-video-streaming-climate-change/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/carbon-footprint-net...
- vitus 11mo ago
  It's way more lopsided than your example would suggest. My understanding is that Netflix can stream 100 Gbps from a 100W server footprint (slide 17 of [0]). Even if you assume every stream is 4k and uses 25 Mbps, that's still thousands of streams. I would guess that the bulk of the power consumption from streaming video is probably from the end-user devices -- a backbone router might consume a couple of kilowatts of power, but it's also moving terabits of traffic. [0] https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf
- ac29 11mo ago
  The 240W number is end to end, including the power usage of a TV. Its also the high end of the estimate of 120-240W

hkt 11mo ago

The greenest AI will be connected to district heat networks instead of being cooled with air or water. It isn't even faintly green when heat is treated as a byproduct instead of a co-benefit.

weikju 11mo ago
Use AI as power source to power the industry!!! Let them live in a virtual world

Insanity 11mo ago

People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true but it’s an apples to pears comparison. Clearly Ecosia is pushing for “people want AI” _and_ we want to make it more ecofriendly. Taking away features from users altogether is not the right answer. It’s like saying “cheapest car is no car”. It doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of “wanting a car”.

oytis 11mo ago
We don't have a problem of wanting AI though
- doublerabbit 11mo ago
  We may when AI wants AI...
nemomarx 11mo ago
Isn't this why transit advocates try to reduce the need for owning a car though? I'm thinking a really good search engine would not make you reach for ai as often and so could be eco friendly that way
- tybit 11mo ago
  Yes, the greenest browser is one that doesn’t use AI. They aren’t claiming they’ve built that though, just the greenest AI.
  - chongli 11mo ago
    I don't use AI though. Are they going to put automatic AI responses on the SERP? That's less green than simply not having AI on the SERP. Giving me something I do not want is wasteful by definition.
  - simianwords 11mo ago
    I disagree. Without AI I might take 15 min to search for something in google that would have taken me a single prompt in ChatGPT. The energy used by my screen in those 15 minutes would be higher than the energy taken by that prompt.

dom96 11mo ago

I haven't kept up to date with this, but last I heard we still aren't certain how much energy AI training/inference actually takes at the big AI companies (OpenAI/Anthropic). Have any of these companies shared this since? What's our closest estimates if not?

JimDabell 11mo ago
Google: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measuring-the-environmental-impact-of-ai-inference/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur... Mistral: https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environmental-standard-for-ai https://mistral.ai/news/our-contribution-to-a-global-environ... OpenAI: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

barishnamazov 11mo ago

> As a not-for-profit company, we can afford to do things differently. AI Search uses smaller, more efficient models, and we avoid energy-heavy features like video generation altogether. I'm a bit confused -- do other search engines provide video generation? Mentioning that sounds too out of place to me. Am I missing something?

LogicFailsMe 11mo ago

I think it is more the greenwashiest AI

xaldir 11mo ago
It goes well with their greenwashing "search engine" (API to bing and google).

parapatelsukh 11mo ago

[dead]

Zambyte 11mo ago

My prompt: tell me about the new zig io interface Ecosia: > The Zig IO interface is associated with Zigbee, a specification for a suite of high-level communication protocols using low-power digital radios. It is often used in IoT (Internet of Things) applications for smart home devices, such as lights, sensors, and smart locks. The Zig IO interface typically allows for seamless communication between devices, enabling automation and remote control. > For specific details about the latest updates or features of the Zig IO interface, I recommend checking the official Zigbee Alliance website or relevant tech news sources for the most current information. If you're interested in sustainable technology or eco-friendly smart home solutions, feel free to ask! Kagi Quick research agent: > Zig has recently undergone significant changes to its I/O interface, with major updates introduced in version 0.15 and further enhancements planned for the upcoming 0.16.0 release. The new I/O system represents a comprehensive rework of the standard library's input/output handling, focusing on improved efficiency, clarity, and flexibility. > The most notable changes include a complete overhaul of the `std.Io.Reader` and `std.Io.Writer` interfaces, which were revamped in a mid-2025 development release as the first step in modernizing Zig's I/O capabilities [^2]. These interfaces in Zig 0.15.1 represent a significant improvement in both efficiency and code clarity, though they require slightly more boilerplate code [^5]. > A key architectural change is that the new I/O interface is non-generic and uses a virtual function table (vtable) for dispatching function calls to concrete implementations [^4]. This approach simplifies the interface while maintaining performance. The upcoming Zig 0.16.0 will introduce new async I/O primitives, building on this reworked foundation and eventually leading to the reintroduction of asynchronous programming capabilities [^1]. > These changes position Zig's I/O system for better performance and more flexible integration with different I/O backends, representing a significant step forward in the language's systems programming capabilities [^3]. [^1]: [Zig's New Async I/O (Text Version) - Andrew Kelley](https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-new-async-io-text-version.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-new-async-io-text-version.h...) (25%) [^2]: [Zig's new Writer - openmymind.net](https://www.openmymind.net/Zigs-New-Writer/ https://www.openmymind.net/Zigs-New-Writer/) (22%) [^3]: [I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface](https://www.openmymind.net/Im-Too-Dumb-For-Zigs-New-IO-Interface/ https://www.openmymind.net/Im-Too-Dumb-For-Zigs-New-IO-Inter...) (21%) [^4]: [Zig's New Async I/O | Loris Cro's Blog](https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-async-io/ https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-async-io/) (17%) [^5]: [Zig 0.15.1 I/O Overhaul: Understanding the New Reader/Writer ...](https://dev.to/bkataru/zig-0151-io-overhaul-understanding-the-new-readerwriter-interfaces-30oe https://dev.to/bkataru/zig-0151-io-overhaul-understanding-th...) (15%) The Ecosia AI does not seem to be grounded in search results. When using small models, this is essentially useless.

rl_shannon 11mo ago

What dumb bullshit! If you run out of ideas or positioning pivot to climate change as a lame excuse of not having enough resources - people or compute

benrutter 11mo ago

I'll be interested to see how this pkays with their actual users. As one myself, I don't object inherently to Ecosia providing AI search. I understand they need to stay competitive with other search. But I find how prominent / hard to avoid their AI search is, reeeeaaally annoying. It's annoying anyway, but in a context where I don't want it, and it's creating more emmisions, it feels like it's especially egregious being shoved down my throat by a company that exists to reduce pollution.

yapyap 11mo ago

why even do AI at all