Google’s Bard Advanced is getting a subscription paywall soon

Google is giving its Bard AI chatbot the premium subscription treatment à la OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus.

The tech giant announced Tuesday in a Q4 earnings call that it plans to lock the recently announced Bard Advanced behind a subscription model. There were no talks about costs or a release date, but Bard in its current biçim is available to users for free, compared to the $20 per month it costs to use ChatGPT-4 with a Plus subscription.

According to Google, Bard Advanced is designed to be more “complex” and have “better responses.” It will be powered by the soon-to-be-released Gemini Ultra, Google’s multimodal large language model, which is set for an “early 2024” release. Bard is currently running on Gemini Pro, which is meant to compete with GPT-3.5, with Ultra touted by Google as a model that will compete with, and in some cases even surpass, GPT-4.

Based on the hype Google is drumming up for Gemini Ultra, it’s speculated that users can expect to hisse a similar price to OpenAI’s premium tier for a chance to use this advanced generative AI.