Google is preparing to launch the best version of its artificial intelligence chatbot Bard Advanced, based on the large language model Gemini Ultra. Access to it will probably be paid.
Developers discovered in publicly available code on Bard's website that Bard Advanced will likely only be available for free for three months. After that, it is probably necessary to have a subscription, which will be called Google One, writes Engadget.
If Google does sign up for Bard Advanced, it would be the company's first attempt to charge for the use of its AI chatbot.
ChatGPT from competitor OpenAI based on the old GPT-3.5 model is available for free. But the latest GPT-4 is offered under the $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription, which launched in February 2023.
Google first announced Bard Advanced in December 2023 – along with the presentation of the Gemini multimodal AI model in three versions – Ultra, Pro and Nano.
It was announced that the test program for the new version of the chatbot will be launched in early 2024. Google claimed that, thanks to Gemini Ultra, the chatbot will begin not only to understand, but also to be able to interact with various types of information, including text, images, audio, video, receive multimodal reasoning capabilities, etc.