> A common misconception is that AI is more expensive than search. Opposite is true - performing a search is 100x-1000x more expensive than doing an interaction with AI.
> A single search is about ~ 1.5 cents (probably bit less these days, but general ballpark)
> A small AI model can generate a lot of tokens for the same price
> To put this in perspective, 1.5 cents of Gemini Flash usage:
> 50,000 input tokens ≈ 37,500 words (roughly 75-150 pages of text) or 6,000 output tokens ≈ 4,500 words (roughly 9-18 pages of text)
> That is A LOT of information for the cost of just 1 search.
> It may be counter-intuitive but that is how it is. If someone is using AI to answer common questions, learn about a concept, do a quick brainstorm or a translation - instead of searching - our cost is (much) lower.
> So if anything, having AI lowers our cost, not increases it. This is why when we added access to AI models to Pro tier we didn't increase the price.
