Meet Gemini Advanced, Google's paid AI service

Meet Gemini Advanced, Google's paid AI service

Grassroots AI development is a very costly process. To build an artificial intelligence or, if you’re a stickler for very precise wording, a large language model (LLM) from the ground up, you have to spend billions of dollars. So it’s not surprising that this domain was first ventured into by very big guys. Nowadays, if you’re looking for a custom, purpose-built AI for your business, it’ll cost you anywhere from US$5,000 through US$60,000, on average, depending on what you actually need. And what’s probably more important, the solution will be built on one of the LLMs from the said big guys, most of which decided to make the code of their respective projects freely available to the public.

That, however, does not make AI development a purely altruistic deal for the top tier players. They certainly earn real money from this undertaking, not just karma points. In a recent post, we covered how Microsoft decrowned Apple as the company with the biggest market cap in the world, and it is obvious that the earlier investments into OpenAI have everything to do with it. Current leaders of the consumer AI race, Copilot and ChatGPT, have paid versions with a number of bells and whistles that make them useful in various use cases. Google, a slightly fresher face on the track, has recently launched Gemini Advanced, an AI subscription service to rival similar products that are already making money for the competition.

Paid AI for the masses bundled with other useful tools, Google's take

On March 21, 2023, Google released Bard, its AI tool. As customary in this field, the LLM was made available to the public free of charge. Recently, Google rebranded it as Gemini, and shortly thereafter launched Gemini Advanced, a subscription-based priority access to a more powerful version of the AI.

On the surface, the offer is rather similar to those of Copilot Pro or ChatGPT Plus:

• US$19,99 user/month (a cent cheaper than the respective paid plans from Microsoft and OpenAI);
• no waiting lines even during peak hours;
• access to “Google's most capable AI model, Ultra 1.0”... “designed for highly complex tasks,” to quote from the product page.

If you do have what to sweeten the deal with, why not?

The real value of the offer shines if you are a routine user of other Google products: Gemini Advanced subscription is bundled with everything the company packed into its Google One Premium plan, including 2TB of storage space, 5-person team, advice from Google Experts, etc. Thus, when you sign up for Gemini Advanced, you are actually paying US$10 less a month than you would have if not for the bundle. A nice deal, really.

But that’s not all: Google promises to integrate Gemini Advanced into its Docs and Gmail which, for those typing upwards of fifteen hundred words a day (that’s us!), will mean a useful assistant that’s never tired. Stay tuned, we’ll keep you posted.