Is Google’s Reveal of Gemini’s Impact Progress or Greenwashing?

Google has released a technical paper detailing the environmental footprint of its Gemini models, estimating a median text prompt consumes 0.24 watt-hours of energy and 0.26 milliliters of water. The scope of this measurement includes energy from TPUs, CPUs, and data center overhead but omits model training costs, external networking, and end-user device impact. This disclosure has sparked debate, viewed as both progress for its transparency and potential greenwashing due to significant omissions and the use of median values that may hide the impact of complex queries. The figures are difficult to compare directly with those from OpenAI's ChatGPT or Mistral AI because of differing measurement methodologies, such as using average versus median consumption.