According to details found by a developer, Google’s Bard Advanced chatbot — a more sophisticated version of the service that competes with Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT — may not be free to use.
Google does not have a good track record when it comes to keeping secrets about prospective products under wraps, and now some new facts about the advanced version of its Bard AI chatbot have appeared online, implying users would eventually have to pay to access Bard Advanced.
The code on the Google Bard website contains references to Bard Advanced, as discovered by developer Bedros Pamboukian (via Android Authority) on X (previously known as Twitter).
“Try Bard Advanced for three months on us,” says the opening sentence. Another one reads, “Get more capable large language models with advanced math and reasoning skills with Bard Advanced for 3 months on us.”
hi, bard advanced will be free for 3 months and you’ll need Google One too, enjoysies
the fact that it’s in prod implies it’s ready & being tested (currently an experiment)
again, not a leaker, but Google keeps putting stuff in plain sight and literally nobody realizes… pic.twitter.com/YqfAK77f0F
— Bedros Pamboukian (@bedros_p) January 3, 2024
These lines of code indicate that Bard Advanced will be available as part of a three-month trial, implying that users will have to pay to continue using Bard Advanced after the free trial period has expired. It is currently unknown when the most advanced version of Bard will be released; the business promised a “early 2024” launch date for the service in December.
Pamboukian adds in a later tweet that Bard Advanced could be related to the company’s Google One membership. A Google One URL — currently broken at the time of publishing this post — hints that Bard Advanced might be included as part of a Google One subscription or accessible as a separate purchase when analysing Bard’s source code from a browser.
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Bard Advanced was announced last month by the company when it unveiled Gemini AI, the company’s most powerful AI model to date. According to recent sources, Google will employ Gemini Nano to power Pixie, an AI assistant specific to Pixel smartphones, while Gemini Pro and Gemini Ultra will power Bard and Bard Advanced, respectively. The latter is likely in the following weeks, in accordance with Google’s “early 2024” deployment timeline.
