AI Chat Search 10 Times As Expensive As Standard Google, Microsoft Search

From Ars Technica, "ChatGPT-style search represents a 10x cost increase for Google, Microsoft: Google hints that an AI chatbot search engine will really cut into its profits." by Ron Amadeo:

Today Google search works by building a huge index of the web, and when you search for something, those index entries gets scanned and ranked and categorized, with the most relevant entries showing up in your search results. Google's results page actually tells you how long all of this takes when you search for something, and it's usually less than a second. A ChatGPT-style search engine would involve firing up a huge neural network modeled on the human brain every time you run a search, generating a bunch of text and probably also querying that big search index for factual information. The back-and-forth nature of ChatGPT also means you'll probably be interacting with it for a lot longer than a fraction of a second.

All that extra processing is going to cost a lot more money. After speaking to Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy (Alphabet is Google's parent company) and several analysts, Reuters writes that "an exchange with AI known as a large language model likely costs 10 times more than a standard keyword search" and that it could represent "several billion dollars of extra costs." *** The cost of search is definitely more of a problem for Google than Microsoft. Part of the reason Microsoft is so eager to rock the search engine boat is that most market share estimates put Bing at only about 3 percent of the worldwide search market, while Google is around 93 percent. Search is a primary business for Google in a way that Microsoft doesn't have to worry about, and with it needing to process 8.5 billion searches every day, Google's per-search costs can pile up very quickly.