Reports suggest that Google is planning to introduce a fee for its AI-powered search features, marking a significant change to its revenue model.
Experts believe this shift is a response to the high costs associated with providing such a service, as many companies in the industry use subscription models to cover expenses.
Originally reported by the Financial Times, Google’s proposal involves offering the new search feature exclusively to users of its premium subscription service. Users who wish to access the AI assistant in other Google tools like Gmail or the Office suite will need to subscribe.
The AI-powered search experience, currently in beta testing with select users, utilizes Google’s generative AI to provide direct answers to queries in a conversational style similar to ChatGPT and other competitors.
Heather Doe, Chief Data Scientist at digital transformation consultancy UST, stated, “AI search is more computationally expensive than traditional search processes. Google is looking to recover these costs by charging for AI search.”
While the cost of training AI models is a significant expense, it is only a fraction of the total cost of AI operations. The majority of spending goes towards running models for inference, which is growing rapidly as more models are deployed into production.
Competitors in the AI search space also offer subscription plans, such as Perplexity, which provides AI-powered search without ads. Some companies, like Microsoft’s Bing, offer AI features for free but tie them to specific products or services.
Source: www.theguardian.com
