8 ms·

Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.

by acheron 10mo ago

cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
That's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.
- enraged_camel 10mo ago
  It’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer? When people have choices and they choose the more harmful action, it hurts their credibility. If Rob cares so much about society and the environment, why did he work at a company that has horrendous track record on both? Someone of his level of talent certainly had choices, and he chose to contribute to the company that abandoned “don’t be evil” a long time ago.
  - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
    Honestly, it seems like Rob Pike may have left Google around the same I did. (2021, 2022). Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.
    - pstuart 10mo ago
      My take was that he had done enough work and had handed the reins of Go to a capable leader (rsc), and that it was time to step away. Ian Lance Taylor on the other hand appeared to have quit specifically because of the "AI everything" mandate. Just an armchair observation here.
    - christophilus 10mo ago
      It was still a wildly wasteful company doing morally ambiguous things prior to that timeframe. I mean, its entire business model is tracking and ads— and it runs massive, high energy datacenters to make that happen.
      - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
        I wouldn't argue with this necessarily except that again the scale is completely different. "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving. And so it's again, a kind of whataboutism that pushes the scale of the issue out of the way in order to make some sort of moral argument which misses the whole point. BTW in my first year at Google I worked on a change where we made some optimizations that cut the # of CPUs used for RTB ad serving by half. There were bonuses and/or recognition for doing that kind of thing. Wasteful is a matter of degrees.
        luckylion 10mo ago
        > "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving. It wasn't only about serving those ads though, traditional machine-learning (just not LLMs) has always been computationally expensive and was and is used extensively to optimize ads for higher margins, not for some greater good. Obviously, back then and still today, nobody is being wasteful because they want to. If you go to OpenAI today and offer them a way to cut their compute usage in half, they'll praise you and give you a very large bonus for the same reason it was recognized & incentivized at Google: it also cuts the costs.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - trimbo 10mo ago
      > Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back. Did you sell all of your stock?
      - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
        Unfortunately, yes. If I hadn't, I might be retired.
        Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
        But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right. Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something Their p/e ratio has almost doubled in just a year which isn't a good sign https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-... So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret. I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.
        cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
        That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work. But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one. I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities. After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.
    - fidotron 10mo ago
      That has been clear since the Google Plus debacle, at the very least.
  - cycomanic 10mo ago
    I would argue that Google actually has had a comparitively good track record on the environment, I mean if you say (pre AI) Google does have a bad track record on the environment, then I wonder which ones do in your opinion. And while we can argue about the societal cost/benefit of other Google services and their use of ads to finance them, I would say there were very different to e.g Facebook with a documented effort to make their feed more addictive
kingkawn 10mo ago
“this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
- xscott 10mo ago
  No, but in this case it indicates some hypocrisy.
- ptero 10mo ago
  > “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration No, but it puts some perspective on things. IMO Google, after abandoning its early "don't be evil" motto is directly responsible for a significant chunk of the current evil in the developed world, from screen addiction to kids' mental health and social polarization. Working for Google and drawing an extravagant salary for many, many years was a choice that does affect the way we perceive other issues being discussed by the same source. To clarify: I am not claiming that Rob is evil; on the contrary. His books and open source work were an inspiration to many, myself included. But I am going to view his opinions on social good and evil through the prism of his personal employment choices. My 2c.
  - WD-42 10mo ago
    This is a purity test that cannot be passed. Give me your career history and I’ll tell you why you aren’t allowed to make any moral judgments on anything as well.
    - bossyTeacher 10mo ago
      Point is he is criticizing Google but still collecting checks from them. That's hypocritical. He would have a little sympathy if he never worked for them. He had decades to resign. He didn't. He stayed there until retirement. He's even using gmail in that post.
      - tczMUFlmoNk 10mo ago
        Rob Pike retired from Google in 2021.
lambda 10mo ago
Data center power usage has been fairly flat for the last decade (until 2022 or so). While new capacity has been coming online, efficiency improvements have been keeping up, keeping total usage mostly flat. The AI boom has completely changed that. Data center power usage is rocketing upwards now. It is estimated it will be more than 10% of all electric power usage in the US by 2030. It's a completely different order of magnitude than the pre AI-boom data center usage. Source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1
- azakai 10mo ago
  The first chart in your link doesn't show "flat" usage until 2022? It is clearly rising at an increasing rate, and it more than doubles over 2014-2022. It might help to look at global power usage, not just the US, see the first figure here: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-power-grid/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g... There isn't an inflection point around 2022: it has been rising quickly since 2010 or so.
  - techjamie 10mo ago
    Basing off Yahoo historical price data, Bitcoin prices first started being tracked in late 2014. So my guess would be the increase from then to 2022 could have largely been attributed to crypto mining.
    - ToValueFunfetti 10mo ago
      It looks like the number of internet users ~doubled in that time as well: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?end=2022&start=2014 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?end=2022...
    - somenameforme 10mo ago
      The energy impact of crypto is rather exaggerated. Most estimates on this front are aiming to demonstrate as a high value as possible, and so should be taken as higher upper bound, and yet even that upper bound is 'only' around 200TWh a year. Annual energy consumption is in the 24,000TWh range with growth averaging around 2% or so per year. So if you looked at a graph of energy consumption, you wouldn't even notice crypto. In fact even LLM stuff will just look like a blip unless it scales up substantially more than its currently trending. We use vastly more more energy than most appreciate. And this is only electrical energy consumption. All energy consumption is something like 185,000 TWh. [1] [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
palmotea 10mo ago
> Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that. How much of that compute was for the ads themselves vs the software useful enough to compel people to look at the ads?
- moltopoco 10mo ago
  Have you dived into the destructive brainrot that YouTube serves to millions of kids who (sadly) use it unattended each day? Even much of Google's non-ad software is a cancer on humanity.
  - mvdtnz 10mo ago
    Sorry what does this have to do with the question you're responding to?
  - palmotea 10mo ago
    How does the compute required for that compare to the compute required to serve LLM requests? There's a lot of goal-post moving going on here, to justify the whataboutism.
  - fsociety 10mo ago
    The real answer is the unsatisfying but true “my shit doesn’t stink but yours sure does”
  - NewJazz 10mo ago
    Have you dived into the mountains of informative content that youtube also makes available to everyone on earth?
    - Y_Y 10mo ago
      Hey, this bathwater has tracea of baby in it!
      - mrguyorama 10mo ago
SoftTalker 10mo ago
Someone paid for those ads. Someone got value from them.
- MangoToupe 10mo ago
  Ads are a cancer on humanity with no benefit to anyone and everyone who enables them should be imprisoned for life
  - otabdeveloper4 10mo ago
    A monetary economy can't function without advertising or money. You're tilting at windmills here, we can't go back to barter.
    - pessimizer 10mo ago
      It can't function without advertising, money, or oxygen, if we're just adding random things to obscure our complete lack of an argument for advertising. We can't go back to an anaerobic economy, silly wabbit.
      - otabdeveloper4 10mo ago
        > our complete lack of an argument for advertising It's literally impossible to start or run a business without advertising your products or services.
- xorcist 10mo ago
  That someone might be Google, though. Not all ad dollars are well spent.
- underdown 10mo ago
  The ad industry is a quagmire of fraud. Assuming someone got value out of money spent is tenuous.
  - 10mo ago
lokar 10mo ago
The ad system uses a fairly small fraction of resources. And before the LLM craze there was a constant focus on efficiency. Web search is (was?) amazingly efficient per query.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
You could at least argue while there is plenty of negatives, at least we got to use many services with ad-supported model. There is no upside to vast majority of the AI pushed by the OpenAI and their cronies. It's literally fucking up economy for everyone else all to get AI from "lies to users" to "lies to users confidently", all while rampantly stealing content to do that, because apparently pirating something as a person is terrible crime govt need to chase you, unless you do that to resell it in AI model, then it's propping up US economy.
- trinsic2 10mo ago
  I feel you. All that time in the beginning of the mp3 era the record industry was perusing people for pirating music. And then when an AI company does it for books, its some how not piracy? If there is any example of hypocrisy, and that we don't have a justice system that applies the law equally, that would be it.
arcatech 10mo ago
What makes you think he didn’t mind it?
jjrh 10mo ago
We weren't facing hardware shortages in the race to shovel ads. Little different.
arendtio 10mo ago
Btw., how do you calculate the toll that ads take on society? I mean, buying another pair of sneakers you don't need just because ads made you want them doesn't sound like the best investment from a societal perspective. And I am sure sneakers are not the only product that is being bought, even though nobody really needs them.

Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.

by acheron 10mo ago

Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.

cmrdporcupine 10mo ago

That's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.

enraged_camel 10mo ago
It’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer? When people have choices and they choose the more harmful action, it hurts their credibility. If Rob cares so much about society and the environment, why did he work at a company that has horrendous track record on both? Someone of his level of talent certainly had choices, and he chose to contribute to the company that abandoned “don’t be evil” a long time ago.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
  Honestly, it seems like Rob Pike may have left Google around the same I did. (2021, 2022). Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.
  - pstuart 10mo ago
    My take was that he had done enough work and had handed the reins of Go to a capable leader (rsc), and that it was time to step away. Ian Lance Taylor on the other hand appeared to have quit specifically because of the "AI everything" mandate. Just an armchair observation here.
  - christophilus 10mo ago
    It was still a wildly wasteful company doing morally ambiguous things prior to that timeframe. I mean, its entire business model is tracking and ads— and it runs massive, high energy datacenters to make that happen.
    - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
      I wouldn't argue with this necessarily except that again the scale is completely different. "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving. And so it's again, a kind of whataboutism that pushes the scale of the issue out of the way in order to make some sort of moral argument which misses the whole point. BTW in my first year at Google I worked on a change where we made some optimizations that cut the # of CPUs used for RTB ad serving by half. There were bonuses and/or recognition for doing that kind of thing. Wasteful is a matter of degrees.
      - luckylion 10mo ago
        > "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving. It wasn't only about serving those ads though, traditional machine-learning (just not LLMs) has always been computationally expensive and was and is used extensively to optimize ads for higher margins, not for some greater good. Obviously, back then and still today, nobody is being wasteful because they want to. If you go to OpenAI today and offer them a way to cut their compute usage in half, they'll praise you and give you a very large bonus for the same reason it was recognized & incentivized at Google: it also cuts the costs.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - trimbo 10mo ago
    > Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back. Did you sell all of your stock?
    - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
      Unfortunately, yes. If I hadn't, I might be retired.
      - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
        But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right. Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something Their p/e ratio has almost doubled in just a year which isn't a good sign https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-... So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret. I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.
        cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
        That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work. But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one. I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities. After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.
  - fidotron 10mo ago
    That has been clear since the Google Plus debacle, at the very least.
- cycomanic 10mo ago
  I would argue that Google actually has had a comparitively good track record on the environment, I mean if you say (pre AI) Google does have a bad track record on the environment, then I wonder which ones do in your opinion. And while we can argue about the societal cost/benefit of other Google services and their use of ads to finance them, I would say there were very different to e.g Facebook with a documented effort to make their feed more addictive

kingkawn 10mo ago

“this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration

xscott 10mo ago
No, but in this case it indicates some hypocrisy.
ptero 10mo ago
> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration No, but it puts some perspective on things. IMO Google, after abandoning its early "don't be evil" motto is directly responsible for a significant chunk of the current evil in the developed world, from screen addiction to kids' mental health and social polarization. Working for Google and drawing an extravagant salary for many, many years was a choice that does affect the way we perceive other issues being discussed by the same source. To clarify: I am not claiming that Rob is evil; on the contrary. His books and open source work were an inspiration to many, myself included. But I am going to view his opinions on social good and evil through the prism of his personal employment choices. My 2c.
- WD-42 10mo ago
  This is a purity test that cannot be passed. Give me your career history and I’ll tell you why you aren’t allowed to make any moral judgments on anything as well.
  - bossyTeacher 10mo ago
    Point is he is criticizing Google but still collecting checks from them. That's hypocritical. He would have a little sympathy if he never worked for them. He had decades to resign. He didn't. He stayed there until retirement. He's even using gmail in that post.
    - tczMUFlmoNk 10mo ago
      Rob Pike retired from Google in 2021.

lambda 10mo ago

Data center power usage has been fairly flat for the last decade (until 2022 or so). While new capacity has been coming online, efficiency improvements have been keeping up, keeping total usage mostly flat. The AI boom has completely changed that. Data center power usage is rocketing upwards now. It is estimated it will be more than 10% of all electric power usage in the US by 2030. It's a completely different order of magnitude than the pre AI-boom data center usage. Source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1

azakai 10mo ago
The first chart in your link doesn't show "flat" usage until 2022? It is clearly rising at an increasing rate, and it more than doubles over 2014-2022. It might help to look at global power usage, not just the US, see the first figure here: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-power-grid/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g... There isn't an inflection point around 2022: it has been rising quickly since 2010 or so.
- techjamie 10mo ago
  Basing off Yahoo historical price data, Bitcoin prices first started being tracked in late 2014. So my guess would be the increase from then to 2022 could have largely been attributed to crypto mining.
  - ToValueFunfetti 10mo ago
    It looks like the number of internet users ~doubled in that time as well: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?end=2022&start=2014 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?end=2022...
  - somenameforme 10mo ago
    The energy impact of crypto is rather exaggerated. Most estimates on this front are aiming to demonstrate as a high value as possible, and so should be taken as higher upper bound, and yet even that upper bound is 'only' around 200TWh a year. Annual energy consumption is in the 24,000TWh range with growth averaging around 2% or so per year. So if you looked at a graph of energy consumption, you wouldn't even notice crypto. In fact even LLM stuff will just look like a blip unless it scales up substantially more than its currently trending. We use vastly more more energy than most appreciate. And this is only electrical energy consumption. All energy consumption is something like 185,000 TWh. [1] [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

palmotea 10mo ago

> Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that. How much of that compute was for the ads themselves vs the software useful enough to compel people to look at the ads?

moltopoco 10mo ago
Have you dived into the destructive brainrot that YouTube serves to millions of kids who (sadly) use it unattended each day? Even much of Google's non-ad software is a cancer on humanity.
- mvdtnz 10mo ago
  Sorry what does this have to do with the question you're responding to?
- palmotea 10mo ago
  How does the compute required for that compare to the compute required to serve LLM requests? There's a lot of goal-post moving going on here, to justify the whataboutism.
- fsociety 10mo ago
  The real answer is the unsatisfying but true “my shit doesn’t stink but yours sure does”
- NewJazz 10mo ago
  Have you dived into the mountains of informative content that youtube also makes available to everyone on earth?
  - Y_Y 10mo ago
    Hey, this bathwater has tracea of baby in it!
    - mrguyorama 10mo ago

SoftTalker 10mo ago

Someone paid for those ads. Someone got value from them.

MangoToupe 10mo ago
Ads are a cancer on humanity with no benefit to anyone and everyone who enables them should be imprisoned for life
- otabdeveloper4 10mo ago
  A monetary economy can't function without advertising or money. You're tilting at windmills here, we can't go back to barter.
  - pessimizer 10mo ago
    It can't function without advertising, money, or oxygen, if we're just adding random things to obscure our complete lack of an argument for advertising. We can't go back to an anaerobic economy, silly wabbit.
    - otabdeveloper4 10mo ago
      > our complete lack of an argument for advertising It's literally impossible to start or run a business without advertising your products or services.
xorcist 10mo ago
That someone might be Google, though. Not all ad dollars are well spent.
underdown 10mo ago
The ad industry is a quagmire of fraud. Assuming someone got value out of money spent is tenuous.
- 10mo ago

lokar 10mo ago

The ad system uses a fairly small fraction of resources. And before the LLM craze there was a constant focus on efficiency. Web search is (was?) amazingly efficient per query.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago

You could at least argue while there is plenty of negatives, at least we got to use many services with ad-supported model. There is no upside to vast majority of the AI pushed by the OpenAI and their cronies. It's literally fucking up economy for everyone else all to get AI from "lies to users" to "lies to users confidently", all while rampantly stealing content to do that, because apparently pirating something as a person is terrible crime govt need to chase you, unless you do that to resell it in AI model, then it's propping up US economy.

trinsic2 10mo ago
I feel you. All that time in the beginning of the mp3 era the record industry was perusing people for pirating music. And then when an AI company does it for books, its some how not piracy? If there is any example of hypocrisy, and that we don't have a justice system that applies the law equally, that would be it.

arcatech 10mo ago

What makes you think he didn’t mind it?

jjrh 10mo ago

We weren't facing hardware shortages in the race to shovel ads. Little different.

arendtio 10mo ago

Btw., how do you calculate the toll that ads take on society? I mean, buying another pair of sneakers you don't need just because ads made you want them doesn't sound like the best investment from a societal perspective. And I am sure sneakers are not the only product that is being bought, even though nobody really needs them.