Why? Are you thinking of an AI-in-a-laptop? You should think in terms of, say, a whole data center as devoted to a single AI. This is how search engines already work - a single "information retrieval" algorithm, using techniques from linear algebra to process the enormous data structures in which the records are kept, in order to answer a query. The move towards AI just means that the algorithm becomes much more complicated. When I remember that we already have warehouses of thousands of networked computers, tended by human staff, containing distributed proto-AIs that interact with the public ... then imminent AI isn't hard to imagine at all.