For tech giants, AI like Bing and Bard poses billion-dollar search problem
As Alphabet Inc looks past a chatbot flub that helped erase $100 billion from its market value, another challenge is emerging from its efforts to add generative artificial intelligence to its popular Google Search: the cost.
Executives across the technology sector are talking about how to operate AI like ChatGPT while accounting for the high expense. The wildly popular chatbot from OpenAI, which can draft prose and answer search queries, has "eye-watering" computing costs of a couple or more cents per conversation, the startup's Chief Executive Sam Altman has said on Twitter.
In an interview, Alphabet's Chairman John Hennessy told Reuters that having an exchange with AI known as a large language model likely cost 10 times more than a standard keyword search, though fine-tuning will help reduce the expense quickly.
Even with revenue from potential chat-based search ads, the technology could chip into the bottom line of Mountain View, Calif.-based Alphabet with several billion dollars of extra costs, analysts said. Its net income was nearly $60 billion in 2022.
Morgan Stanley estimated that Google's 3.3 trillion search queries last year cost roughly a fifth of a cent each, a number that would increase depending on how much text AI must generate. Google, for instance, could face a $6-billion hike in expenses by 2024 if ChatGPT-like AI were to handle half the queries it receives with 50-word answers, analysts projected. Google is unlikely to need a chatbot to handle navigational searches for sites like Wikipedia.
Others arrived at a similar bill in different ways. For instance, SemiAnalysis, a research and consulting firm focused on chip technology, said adding ChatGPT-style AI to search could cost Alphabet $3 billion,
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