Google Bard Advanced Confirmed to Get a Paid Subscription, to Be Powered by Gemini Ultra AI Model

Google Bard Advanced, the company’s upcoming generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot, has been confirmed to get a paid subscription model. Google made the announcement during its Q4 2023 earnings call but did not disclose pricing details or a possible launch date. Google’s AI chatbot was first announced in early 2023 as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat). At the time of the announcement, it was powered by the tech giant’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), and later by the Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2).

However, in December 2023, Google unveiled its latest AI model Gemini and claimed it to be the company’s “largest and most capable AI model.” It came in three versions. Gemini Nano is for on-device performances and is presently available on Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. Gemini Pro is the standard AI model capable of a wide range of tasks including multimodal capability and it subsequently replaced PaLM 2 to power Google Bard chatbot. The most powerful version, Gemini Ultra, has now been confirmed to power Google Bard Advanced.

Unlike Gemini Nano and Gemini Pro, Gemini Ultra is meant for highly complex tasks, multimodal support, and even the creation of chatbots. Google claimed that the AI model outperformed both GPT-4 as well as human experts on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark for text outputs with a 90 percent score (GPT-4 received 86.4 percent).

Google has not shared any pricing details, launch date, or the features that will come with Google Bard Advanced. However, looking at its specialization, it is expected to be an enterprise tool. As such, Google might bundle it with its Workspace subscription. One report also claimed that the upcoming AI assistant might be linked with Google One subscription based on the code on the Google Bard website.

Predicting the possible pricing is a trickier task given the full suite of features remains unknown. But looking at the trend, popular AI chatbots such as ChatGPT Plus, Copilot Pro, and Claude Pro all fetch a price tag between $10 (roughly Rs. 800) and $20 (roughly Rs. 1,650) a month. If Google follows the same trend, this is where Bard Advanced should be placed as well. However, it can be more expensive if the tech giant decides to add one of its under-testing AI models such as Vertex AI (for image generation), MusicLM (for music generation), or Lumiere (for text-to-video and image-to-video generation) along with the subscription.