Is a ChatGPT-style search engine a good idea? The stock market certainly seems to think so, with $100 billion lost from Google’s market value after the company’s recent AI search event slump . However, it will be difficult to actually turn chatbots into a viable business.Add to that fact, Google has been offering a chat search interface (Google Assistant) for seven years now, but the world’s largest Advertisers aren’t monetizing it. A new report from Reuters also points to another financial problem with generating chat sessions for each search. This means that they are much more expensive to run than traditional search engines.
Google Search now works by building a huge index of the web, and when you search for something, those index entries are scanned, ranked and categorized, and the most relevant entries appear in your search results. It shows. Google’s search results page shows how long it actually takes to search for something, usually less than a second. ChatGPT-style search engines fire up huge neural networks modeled after the human brain each time you perform a search, generating tons of text and possibly again Query factual information in its large search index. Also, the back-and-forth nature of ChatGPT means that you probably interact for much longer than just a split second.
All that extra processing costs more. After speaking with Alphabet chairman John Hennessey (Alphabet is the parent company of Google) and several analysts, Reuters said, “In exchange for AI, known as large-scale language models, standard keyword searches likely to cost 10 times as much as the
It’s debatable how many billions of Google’s $60 billion annual net profit will be siphoned off by chatbots. One of his estimates in the Reuters report comes from Morgan Stanley, who said that if “an AI like ChatGPT handled half of the queries he receives with his 50-word answer,” Google’s annual cost would be It is expected to increase by $6 billion. Another estimate by a consulting firm semi-analysis claims it will cost $3 billion.
In its initial post about the “bard” chatbot, Google hinted that server time was an issue and said it would start with a “lightweight model version” of Google’s language model. Scale to more users and enable more feedback. It’s interesting to see Google being cautious about scale.google is Google— Already operating at a scale that overwhelms most companies, can Handle the compute load you want to put in. “Scale” is just a matter of what Google wants to pay for.
The cost of search is arguably a bigger issue for Google than for Microsoft. One reason Microsoft is keen to rock the search engine boat is that most market share estimates suggest that Bing is only about 3% of the global search market, compared to Google about 93%. Search is Google’s main business in a way that Microsoft shouldn’t have to worry about, and with 8.5 billion searches to be processed every day, Google’s per-search cost could add up very quickly. I have.
Alphabet’s Hennessy told Reuters that Google is looking to cut costs, calling it “a matter of years at worst.” Google has worked on issues like this in the past. For example, we acquired YouTube and were able to drive down costs enough to turn it into a money-making machine. Today, we continue to innovate, such as building our own video transcoding chip. The company also builds custom server chips for machine learning called Tensor Processing Units. Still, with Google’s cost-cutting massacre over the last few months, it’s not ideal to suddenly stare at a major consumer product whose cost is skyrocketing for “a few years.”
It’s not yet clear how much money can be made from chatbots that are supposed to answer directly. After years of this “we’ll figure it out later” monetization mentality, Google and Amazon’s voice assistants have both failed to turn a profit, and both have turned to more limited chatbots. I’m sorry. The creator of ChatGPT, he says OpenAI charges per word generated, which doesn’t work for search engines (and is riding a wave of hype and investor excitement, and what It has been coasting over the years). According to another Reuters report, Microsoft has already met with advertisers and said: [ads] Translated into a response generated by the Bing chatbot. ”
For Google, comparing this new-style chat search engine to the old-style chat search engine is again a question, and it is unclear whether the chatbot interface will bring in more or less advertising revenue. You can imagine a future where getting the right answer right away saves you time on Google compared to having to go through a list. If that’s true, none of these new search engine money calculations look good.
