Got an email from Google about my AI chatbot experiment being a waste of server space

I spent 3 months building a little AI assistant to help small business owners in Des Moines manage their inventory. It was just a side project, maybe 50 users. Then Google alerts me that my model was using 40 times more compute than average for the responses it was generating. That stat really surprised me, I thought I had optimized it pretty well. Has anyone else gotten flagged for inefficient model usage and had to redesign their whole pipeline?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_drew25d agoTop Commenter

Totally feel you on this one. I built a little script to help me schedule pest control routes more efficiently and it sounded fine on paper but Google basically sent me a cease and desist for hitting their servers way too hard. I think I was generating one call per second or something dumb like that when I could have just batched it all at once. Had to totally redo the whole thing from scratch and learned about rate limiting the hard way. It's wild how easy it is to miss something obvious until the big G sends you that email. Makes you wonder how many other little guys are out there getting the same slap on the wrist.

grant.parker25d ago

Man, @the_drew did Google actually give you a timeframe on fixing it or was it more like a "fix it now or else" kind of warning? I'm always curious how strict they are about that stuff.