Comment by myrmidon
3 hours ago
> Not at the actual price it's going to cost though.
But we don't know that pricepoint yet; current prices for all this are inflated because of the gold-rush situation, and there are lots of ways to trim marginal costs. At worst, high longterm un-optimizable costs are going to decrease use/adoption a bit, but I don't even think that is going to happen.
Just compare the situation with video hosting: That was not profitable at first, but hardware (and bandwidth) got predictably cheaper, technology more optimized and monetization more effective and now its a good chunk of googles total revenue.
You could have made the same arguments about video hosting in 2005 (too expensive, nobody pays for this, where's the revenue) but this would have led to extremely bad business decisions in hindsight.
Not to mention, most arguments about costs of AI inference are plain inane.
AI search being 10x more expensive than Google query? That's just a silly, meaningless number - especially considering that a good AI response easily stops the user from making 5+ search queries to get the same results, and AI query itself can easily issue the equivalent of 10-20 search queries + spends compute analyzing their results.