Industry experts believe that the new initiative can bring a big change in the company’s revenue model in its history.
Experts believe that the shift is a natural after effect of the vast expense required to provide the service.
The new initiative is believed to have the potential to leave leading technology players in a variety of subscription models to cover its costs.
“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,” Heather Dawe, chief data scientist , digital transformation consultancy UST, highlighted.
Google is planning to charge for its AI-based search features, according to reports. Industry experts believe that the new initiative can bring a big change in the company’s revenue model in its history.
The shift!
Experts believe that the shift is a natural after effect of the vast expense required to provide the service. The new initiative is believed to have the potential to leave leading technology players in a variety of subscription models to cover its costs. “Google is looking at whether it should add certain AI-powered search features to its premium subscription services,” as per insights from Financial Times reports. The service is believed to have already offered access to Google’s new AI assistant Gemini and ChatGPT, Google’s chatbot.
Reportedly Google would involve the company in offering its new search feature to users of its premium subscription services, which customers already have to sign up to if they want to use artificial intelligence assistants in other Google tools such as Gmail and its office suite. Experts believe that Google’s attempt to change some of its privacy conditions is expected to help them to scrape YouTube and use the text transcriptions of YouTube to train their models. These models are extremely data-hungry, and to build newer and more powerful models requires more compute and more data
Industry reacts
From what it is understood, there has been a focus within AI on the huge expense of the computing power used to train cutting-edge generative models. For example in 2023 Amazon ran a single training run that cost $65 million (£51m), as per insights by James Hamilton, an engineer, who expects the company to break the $1 billion mark in the future. “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,” Heather Dawe, chief data scientist , digital transformation consultancy UST, highlighted.
Industry experts believe that Google charging for AI-assisted search can actually cost much more for Google than normal search and they have been searching for a business model to pay for this type of search. “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 tis free for the consumer and the advertiser pays for the cost as well as the profit. So, it’s an interesting development,” Jaspreet Bindra , founder , TechWhisperer UK Limited, concluded.
