For tech giants, AI like Bing and Bard poses billion-dollar search problem

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California – As Alphabet looks past a chatbot flub that helped erase $100 billion from its market value, another challenge is emerging from its efforts to add generative artificial intelligence to its popular Google Search: the cost. Executives across the technology sector are talking about how to operate AI like ChatGPT while accounting for the high expense. The wildly popular chatbot from OpenAI, which can draft prose and answer search queries, has "eye-watering" computing costs of a couple or more cents per conversation, the startup's Chief Executive Sam Altman has said on Twitter. In an interview, Alphabet's Chairman John Hennessy said that having an exchange with AI known as a large language model likely cost 10 times more than a standard keyword search, though fine-tuning will help reduce the expense quickly. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software.