Google plans to introduce payment for Internet search using artificial intelligence – media
Google is developing plans to start charging for the use of its new AI-powered search features. This could be the biggest upheaval in the company’s revenue model in its history, The Guardian reports.
Google’s proposals suggest that the company will offer its new search feature exclusively to premium subscription users. It will supposedly allow the use of AI assistants in other tools, such as Gmail or an office suite.
According to experts, such a radical change is a natural consequence of the huge costs required to provide the service. This will eventually force every leading player in the sector to offer different subscription models to cover their costs.
AI search is more expensive than traditional search. By charging for AI search, Google will try to at least recoup these costs
Heather Doe, chief data officer at UST Consulting
Training AI is a very expensive process
Much of the attention in AI is focused on the huge cost of computing power used to train generative models. According to engineer James Hamilton, last year Amazon spent $65 million on a single training launch alone.
Recently, OpenAI and Microsoft announced plans to build a $100 billion data center. And in January, Mark Zuckerberg said that his goal was to spend at least $9 billion on NVIDIA GPUs alone.
However, AI training costs account for only a tenth of the total spending in the sector, according to analyst Brent Till of Jefferies. According to him, most of the costs are spent on launching rather than training models.
More than 90% of AI computing costs today are spent on inference, as it is growing much faster than training
Brent Till
Many companies have set fees for using AI
Till added that some companies have already established monthly subscription fees for new AI features. For example, the Perplexity search engine does not display ads, but offers a “professional” tier for $20 per month, which provides access to more powerful AI models and unlimited use.
However, other companies continue to offer their products at a loss. The artificial intelligence features in Microsoft’s Bing search engine are free of charge, but tied to the Edge browser. Arc, a web search and browsing startup, also does not charge for the use of its services. However, the developers do not rule out that in the future they will launch business tariffs for entrepreneurs.
