They certainly handle google scale compute. It's a scale even google couldn't handle at the moment uncontrolled. Hardware for this art of compute is very limited and not remotely comparable to google search
It is indeed comparable given that people here are talking about replacing Google with ChatGPT as a so-called 'search engine'. Even in that case, ChatGPT search queries are far more expensive than a Google search and requires more hardware to scale regardless.
Google's scale of usage is 8.5 billion searches per day. For OpenAI, the costs for that scale will just skyrocket and OpenAI cannot handle that which explains why they are already pausing new sign ups even when they have a login wall.
So it would be even worse for OpenAI had they opened ChatGPT up without a login just like Google doesn't require a login just like most search engines.
Let's not act like Google Bard isn't behind curtains. They face the same scaling issues like Openai/Microsoft. People are using search in a very different way than a LLM. Openai isn't simply replacing a search catalog to websites, it's replacing the internet as we know it so i don't see how this can be compared. Most people on earth won't have nearly unlimited access to this technology at the moment because of hardware limitations that all providers in this game face but those who have are at an advantage.
