Google has been sitting on AI search for a long time - I recall people saying it simply wasn't cost effective to do AI powered search because the way AI costs scale. Has something changed on this front or is it just an arms race?
My take: Today, using AI for search-related problems is still not cost-effective for most use cases. That being said, the landscape is evolving quickly. First, in some areas, an individual search creates more value than in others. An individual consumer doing a Google Search is totally different from a lawyer searching for reference material. Areas where the individual search creates more value can already benefit from AI today. Second, LLMs become exponentially cheaper, driven by more cost-effective computing but also more cost-effective models. Look at the pricing of GPT4o-mini vs GPT4 (the original). The models are comparable in performance for many search-related problems, but the price has decreased by 200x in 1.5 years ($0.15 vs $30 per 1M token). If that price trend continues, more and more search use cases will benefit from AI.
