The cost of chatbot-based research

But there is one issue we don’t think about, namely the costs associated with these new technologies. As we well know, the impact of our Internet activities, even just for the consumption of electricity for search engine servers, is very significant, but the arrival of the new chatbots could increase it up to 10 times. Let’s see why.

An increase of up to 10 times in costs is estimated, but it is still too early to tell According to an estimate by Morgan Stanley, one of our Google searches currently costs the company about 1/5th of a cent of a dollar (roughly equivalent to 0.0019 euros).

Trifles, but multiply that by the 3.3 trillion searches done in 2022 and you’ll understand that it has some impact. However, Alphabet president John Hennessy has now said in an interview that a language model like Bard could drive up search costs 10 times over traditional keyword research. This is because Bard replies with complex answers, which leads to additional computational costs, including the cost of chips, maintenance and electricity. According to SemiAnalysis Bard could cost up to $3 billion in use, but the estimate is limited by the number of Tensor Processing Units Google has.

According to Reuters, however, the impact on GrandeG’s coffers would increase in proportion to the percentage of searches made using a chatbot (y axis) and the number of words that the chatbot uses in the response (x axis). If 50% of searches resulted in a 50-word response, Google would see a $6 billion increase in costs.