We’re building AI that answers to the planet. And it’s now more European – which means more independent, and more private.
“our mind poison is DOC French!”
Our AI is 100% optional, like it has always been. Turn off Overviews anytime.
AI overviews should be opt-in, not opt-out.
I like Ecosia’s overall mission (focus on eco-friendlyness, building an independent index together with Quant etc.) it’s my main search engine now, with all AI features disabled. But I just checked with a private browser and the front page features the slogan “AI that answers to the planet”. I don’t like this switch to being an AI chatbot first, search engine second.
AI overviews should be opt-in, not opt-out
I have found them useful from time to time, i turned them off because I know where to find the switch button and for environmental reasons it would be way better to force this on everyone - but knowing a lot of people might not find this button, or even look for it, i could also see how some users might be lured (back) to the big tech alternative.
Also for us a box where you type in a search query is different as a box where you start a conversation, but i think this difference will only grow smaller - just like how desktop web pages changed appearance because of mobile-first design. Not saying you have to like it of course, but i can see the business decision here choosing growth over principles. Them getting a bigger market share is, imo, more important than them having a small carbon footprint.
Feels like greenwashing, in addition to cashing in on the growing pro-eu/nationalistic(?) sentiment in face of people suddenly realising that the western colony that’s been terrorising large swathes of the world for centuries aren’t actually the good guys.
There’s no such thing as an eco-friendly LLM, and Mistral is a company of crooks. They just happen to be European crooks. We shouldn’t approve of crooks.
Why the Mistral hate? Was there some controversy I missed?
It’s an LLM company, there’s no such thing as an environmentally friendly or ethical LLM company. They’re not automatically a better company just because they’re based here in Europe.
This “transparent and trustworthy” corporation provides their weights, but their datasets are still closed. There’s this little “controvery” from a while back, where their models were 60 times more likely to generate CSAM than OpenAI’s models.
Ergo, their training material includes CSAM. Ergo, just like all other LLM companies they’ve scoured the internet for all data they can get. It’s all theft, all the way down.
They’ve also had problems with GDPR compliance, and their solution was to just change their TOS.
It’s an AI company who does all the same bs as the others.
If you can explain how any LLM, Mistral included, actually removes CO2/Methane from the Earth’s atmosphere, I’m all ears.
Don’t you believe in techno Jesus? Salvation from climate change is near, just one more data center and we will have all the answers! (Spoiler: We already have all the answers, we just don’t like them.)
No hate, is that just LLMs consume more water than towns, and here we have a supposedly eco friendly search engine using one. At least they should make it opt-in.
100%, but calling it eco-friendly is more on Ecosia than on Mistral. Haven’t seen them make that claim.
For the rest, I agree, their practices are probably just as bad or only slightly better (due to EU regulations) than those of their US/Chinese counterparts.
I just thought “Mistral is a company of crooks” meant that there was something specific to Mistral.
It is greenwashing, that’s why
something doesn’t match… Eco friendly search engine with LLM (which are known for guzzling water) ?!?
Many AI datacenters use closed-loop cooling. Loaded once with RO purified water without any additions and zero discharge. I know because I work in one.
However, it’s the bad actors that get the headlines.
I don’t know if I’d say “many”, but the water usage is a red herring anyway. More importantly, data centers invariably use a lot of power and they are explicitly the reason we are currently reactivating mothballed nuclear and coal power plants, the reason we are not shutting down natural gas plants, in fact many of them are running temporarily, regularly or even full-time on their own small-scale natural gas turbines.
And they are doing this to generate mass quantities of shitty text and images, and to train new models to do the same, things that provide little to no actual value to humanity.
AI datacenters are an environmental catastrophe, whether they use any water or not.
Yes, technological societies use more and more electricity. Once cities were clogged with horses and shit. Steam engines ran on wood and coal. Cars are migrating from gasoline to electric.
I bought my suburban house 10 years ago. It had 50amp service. It had previously owned by the police chief. I had to immediately upgrade to 200 amps. The same is true for many houses in my area. None of these 1960 houses were meant for microwaves, central A/C, or a freezer in the basement. Not to mention electric for the car. My neighbor offsets this with solar.
When my company builds a new site, we make certain that capacity is added to the community that exceeds our use. And we pay for the build out. How the community adds that is their choice.
My place hosts for a biomedical. I understand they are working on molecular research including a Parkinson’s treatment. Meaningful work.
Not. All. Datacenters.
Musk, certainly is an asshole. Microsoft and Meta, too. I can’t speak to others.
Sustainable technological societies do NOT use more and more electricity, until such time as they have ensured that the externalized environmental costs of the energy providing that electricity have been adequately addressed. Posing our mostly fossil-fuelled “technological society” as if it is the only available choice besides the stone age is ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your first point. Just that current human nature is short-term and selfish. Humans have never acted in a rational forward-looking way. I feel humans need to change in a foundational way before we see any kind of sustainable society.
And I don’t think I claimed the second. Again, just the way things are. Can we abolish capitalism and private ownership and personal autonomy to establish a new global society based on universal respect of all living beings? Sure. Will we? Not until we become something other than what we now consider “human”.
Personally, I think we are hopelessly doomed in the long run. But I have hope that I’m wrong.
question: if it is a closed loop, how do you dump the heat out of the water? To the air? Doesn’t that alter the climate of local habitat?
You see that in any city area.
Yes, but that applies for all human activity, we always dump heat into the air around us one way or another. Even just by being alive. The issue with open loop cooling is it also evaporates a ton of water and works best in dry climates, which is why they’re building new evaporative cooled data centers in deserts. Where water is scarce.
How come that one town lost water pressure?
Without details, I can’t say. Like I said, there are bad actors.
And it only doubles the amount of power usage of any metropolitan area it is installed in…
Yeah what a nonsensical pile of shite. If anything it’s a good case study of why not to take any notice of marketing.
Yeah no, I’m out.
deleted by creator
“Our shit kinda tastes like cherries if you ignore the overwhelming flavor of shit!” Great, if I ever decide to eat shit, yours will be my first choice, I guess.
Our shit, got shitier.
Gross
Wow! That’s amazing! You should delete it and fire everyone involved!
EDIT: We should submit a bug report over it: https://support.ecosia.org/article/985-how-to-report-bug#How-to-report-a-bug-ckZMC
Gonna chime in and say that water and electricity usage for one AI summary is negligible. Even if it’s not anymore when millions of people do it, that’s not a significant problem imo. While I hate the AI technocrat propanda recolution, I think strengthening Mistral AI is good for European strength and resilience. I, yes, I acknowledge that European politicians are just as neoliberally and technocratically polished as the Americans.
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