> When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again

I just tried this from two different devices, neither logged in, both on separate IPs from different states.

Got the exact same answer.

These are almost certainly cached. It would be naive to think Google is performing the same LLM requests over and over again for the same terms for no reason.

For me, google searches are defaulting to "AI mode"

I just asked it the same question on 2 different devices.

The question I asked was harder than why is the sky blue. I asked it "who was Edmund Fitzgerald".

One device, it gives me the ship. The other device, it gives me the person. I can copy/paste the answers here, if we want to compare.

Again, this could happen because I used "too hard" of a question. But I'm definitely getting 2 different answers.

You can of course, do this will almost every LLM. I can ask copilot 3 times and get conflicting answers each time.

Maybe for some types of questions that's beneficial. But for simple "what is X" questions, it's not as useful.