Google Achieves 33x Energy Cut for Gemini Apps

Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and
commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives
around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.


In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I spotlight Google’s stunning 33x
reduction in AI power consumption, what it means for the future
of sustainable tech, and how bold innovation is driving the AI
revolution forward.


 


Highlights


00:23 — Google says it has achieved a 33x
reduction in power consumption for Gemini apps’ text prompts. A
remarkable number. Google, rather than just saying, “Well, hey,
we’re going to go invest all our money in getting as many users
as we can, and we’ll deal down the road with some of the energy
implications,” have said, “No—now is the time to do it.”


01:37 — Now it’s got a larger metric here that
it uses for the total—what it calls carbon footprint—down
by 44x. All of the details behind this have been released in a
blog post by a couple of executives.


02:31 — Google has adopted a completely
end-to-end approach to doing this, where it’s taking a look at
all of the different technology up and down its stack that could
have an input on this. And the data it’s collecting is going to
give them a fantastic foundation to continue this effort into the
future.The AI Revolution, we can safely say now, is not going to
boil the Earth.


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03:42 — Several years ago, Google Cloud was
number nine on the Cloud Wars Top 10. I’m not sure at the time
why it was not number ten, but it had fantastic technology, but
could not fully put that in the service of their customers. It
was sort of like a mismatch. It’s harnessed it over the last
several years, under Thomas Kurian, to be fully in service of
what customers want and need.


04:44 — These breakthroughs by Google and Google
Cloud, across the board (again, the details of this in the
article coming up later today) show that there’s incredible
potential to keep doing this. And I think it’s this power of
innovation that says: Don’t be afraid of big ideas. Go after
them. Dig into it. Try new approaches to it. There are better
ways forward.


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