Gemini: The new chatbot, workplace helpers, and search as part of Google’s AI plan for the next era of tech
Google announced today that Bard, its experimental chatbot hurriedly launched last March, is now called Gemini—taking the same name of the text, voice, and image capable AI model that started powering the Bard chatbot back in December. Gemini is also getting more prominent positioning among Google’s services. It will have an app for both phones and mobile devices, as well as being put into the primary app of the search engine.
With today’s release, there’s a new tier of Google One service called the AI Premium plan, which costs $20 per month; subscribe and you’ll get the standard Google One benefits, plus access to the new chatbot.
When OpenAI created a new era of tech, the industry leader, Google, responded by reorganizing its labs and launching a large number of different Artificial Intelligence (ai) services. The Bard chatbot, workplace helpers Duet artificial intelligence and a version of search were included.
The company plans to roll out a Gemini integration with Gmail and Google Docs for AI Premium subscribers, but the exact release date for this feature is unknown. The initial results were not great, but they did show promise. It may be possible to improve the user experience of trying to find old emails by using a big language model.
Gemini Advanced may be better at understanding the context of user prompts than GPT-4 is. It should also perform better at jobs like writing code when compared to previous large language models. Although it is only designed to answer English questions, additional languages are expected to receive support with future versions.
While aspects of Google’s Gemini Ultra model were shown off months ago in sometimes questionable demos, the juiced up version was not made available to the public during Gemini’s initial rollout. The more capable version has arrived.
The gen AI chip crunch also explains why although AI Premium is an expansion of Google One it comes with a significant restriction. While established Google One benefits such as storage can be split among six Google accounts without additional fees, only the plan manager will have access to Gemini Advanced. “We want to build a really sustainable long term business here,” Shimrit Ben-Yair says.
Shimrit Ben-Yair, vice president and general manager for the Google One business, tells WIRED that defraying the costs of the computing power behind Gemini is “definitely part of the thinking” in requiring a subscription to access the most advanced version. The last time there was an artificial intelligence feature behind a paywall, it wasn’t the last. “It’s just the first step in many more of these generative AI features coming to the market through Google One,” she says.
Google got to where it is mostly by offering free services stuffed with ads but has increasingly experimented with a different business model: Selling subscriptions for extra perks. It was introduced in 2006 to provide more photo storage for users who were not interested in hitting the delete button. You have the option to pay for more space for emails, documents, and recordings, or you can remove ads from YouTube. Today the company added a major new pitch, asking people to pay extra to access smarter and more capable productivity helpers.