According to Ars Technica, the AI-powered language models Google and Microsoft are implementing into their search engines will come at a large cost to the firms because the technology takes far more computer resources per query than traditional search engines.
According to Morgan Stanley, Google’s expenses might rise by $6 billion (R110 billion) if ChatGPT-like AI handles 50% of the questions it receives with 50-word responses.
The additional computer power required to run AI-powered search engines accounts for the higher expenses. It need tremendous processing capacity and relies on processors costing billions of dollars.
Inference is the process of processing AI-powered searches, in which the answer to a question is inferred based on past training and utilises a neural network built on the biology of the human brain.
Traditional search engines, on the other hand, entail the creation of a web index. When a query is entered, the index items are scanned, ranked, and classified in order to provide the most relevant entries in search results.
Higher search prices will almost certainly be a bigger issue for Google than for Microsoft, since the Alphabet-owned business controls around 93% of the global search market.
Microsoft controls less than 3% of the worldwide search industry.
It is also a main business for Google, and with about 8.5 billion searches every day, its per-search charges quickly add up.
Alphabet’s John Hennessy told Reuters that Google hopes to cut down the cost of AI-powered search, which he described as “a couple year problem at worst”.
Google launched its ChatGPT competitor — Bard — on Monday, 6 February 2023, opening it up to trusted testers and stated it is developing the service for the public “in the coming weeks”.
When a commercial for the language model depicted Bard providing an incorrect answer to the question of which telescope captured the first photo of an exoplanet, the company’s stock dropped.
According to Bard, it will be the freshly launched James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Nonetheless, Nasa claims that the terrestrial Very Large Telescope (VLT) won the award in 2004.
