Alphabet (Alphabet) President John Hennessy said his company is facing significant financial challenges by integrating generative AI into Google's search engine, as he stated in an interview with Reuters, more times than traditional keyword-based search engines.
Google introduced its intelligent chatbot (Bard) in early February, which it wants to integrate into the Google Engine, similar to what Microsoft did with ChatGPT in the Bing Engine.
The problem, according to Hennessy, is the computing power needed for AI-based research, since chatbots rely on processing billions of dollars' worth of chips. In addition to the usual costs, companies that use this technology also have to bear the costs of higher energy consumption. He said the cost of running AI bots, along with declining revenue from traditional search advertising, would have a significant impact on companies like Alphabet.
By using artificial intelligence to answer half of the roughly 3.3 trillion searches Google performed last year at a cost of about five cents each, 50-word responses could cost the company up to $6 billion in 2024, according to Reuters.
Alphabet is under pressure to rise to the challenge after arch-rival Microsoft jumped into the Bing engine, albeit at a heavy cost. According to recent research, Microsoft is trying to break Alphabet's hold on the search engine market, whose search engine (Google) has 91% of the market share.
Fear of AI inaccuracy and operational costs are two of the top reasons search and social media companies, despite billions of dollars, have delayed adoption of the technology, according to Reuters. For this reason, Alphabet researchers and others have been looking for ways to train AI models more cheaply.
According to the report, companies like OpenAI have been able to find ways to cut costs by creating complex software code to boost chipset performance. Another solution is to use smaller AI models for simpler tasks. And Google announced that it is relying on a simplified version of the LaMDA language model to run its own smart robot, Bard, which will allow the company to serve a larger number of users.