For over a year, Google has been working to integrate a conversational assistant into its search engine. The idea of this future functionality is simple: for the company, it is about adapting to changes in uses since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and using artificial intelligence (AI) to better respond to requests Internet users. But changing the operation and interface of the group’s flagship represents a challenge: it raises obvious questions of service reliability, but also raises economic issues.
The questioning is such that Google is considering, according to Financial Times, to require payment of a subscription to access all or part of these new search functionalities via AI. Take full advantage of the responses formulated by the chatbot would thus be reserved for subscribers only, explains the economic daily, Thursday April 4. For Google, this would be a break with the long-established economic model for its search engine: a free service financed by advertising linked to keywords typed by the Internet user (adwords) and placed in various places on the results pages.
One of the reasons for these questions is linked to a hidden face of AI services: their cost. Training a language or image processing model with hundreds of billions of parameters can cost more than $100 million (92 million euros) in computer computing capacity, but, then, its use also requires spending a few fractions of a cent for each request from an Internet user. This price is higher than for a classic query on a search engine (for example, it is 10 dollars per million characters typed in the query and 30 dollars in response, for the powerful GPT-4 Turbo model from OpenAI). In February 2023, operating ChatGPT cost OpenAI $700,000 per day, according to estimates from SemiAnalysis, for 13 million active users. There are now 100 million of them.
Significant costs
These significant costs are reflected in the first marketing methods chosen for conversational AI functionalities: to benefit from Copilot, the Microsoft assistant created with OpenAI AI models, in the Office office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), you have to pay an additional subscription of 30 dollars per month. Using similar capabilities in the Google Workspace office suite requires paying $20 per month. Google also launched the Google One AI Premium subscription in February, which gives access to its best AI model (1.0 Ultra) in its Gemini conversational assistant (formerly called Bard) and its use in the Gmail, Meet, Docs services. … Available in 150 countries but not in France, it is billed at $19.99 per month, compared to only $2 to $10 for Google One subscriptions, created in 2018 to allow you to purchase more online storage for your documents.
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