As per Industry experts, Google is planning to start charging for its AI-based search features. This change, if implemented, can bring forth new direction and big change in Google’s revenue model, say the experts.
For First time Google Considers Implementing Charges for its Services
As per the experts, the company’s wish to implement a charge for use comes natural since huge expense is incurred by the company itself to provide the service.
The reports say that “Google is looking at whether it should add certain AI-powered search features to its premium subscription services”.
It is believed that the services are already offered across Google’s new AI assistant Gemini and ChatGPT, Google’s chatbot.
Once the company implements this, users shall have to sign up to if they want to use AI assistants in other Google tools which includes Gmail as well as its office suite.
If the experts are to be believed, Google is attempting to change some of its privacy conditions which is expected to help them to scrape YouTube and use the text transcriptions of YouTube to train their models.
Since these models require huge amount of data, in order to build such data hungry newer powerful models, more computation as well as more data is required.
Costs and Challenges of AI-Assisted Search
In order to train cutting-edge generative models, there is huge expense of the computing power. To give you example, as per insights by an engineer named James Hamilton, Amazon spent $65 million (£51m) to do a single training run in 2023. The engineer believes that in near future the company would also break the $1 billion mark.
Heather Dawe, chief data scientist, digital transformation consultancy UST, speaking on the search processes highlighted that the “AI search is more expensive to compute than Google’s traditional search processes. So in charging for AI search Google will be seeking to at least recoup these costs”.
In order to pay for the AI-assisted search, Google has also been searching for a business model to keep up with the costs since AI-assisted search can actually cost a lot more than the regular one.
Jaspreet Bindra , founder , TechWhisperer UK Limited while speaking about AI assisted search and its cost and revenue implications, said that “They have tried advertising, which has worked so well for them in normal search, but they don’t seem to have cracked it for AI-assisted search. And, therefore, for the first time – ever – for any of their products they are looking to charge the end consumer. Their entire business is built on the fact that everything is free for the consumer and the advertiser pays for the cost as well as the profit. So, it’s an interesting development”.
