Google has been busy revamping its AI offerings, renaming Bard to Gemini, launching a dedicated Android app, and much more. There's also now a paid tier for Google's generative AI engine for the first time, which means another digital subscription for you to evaluate.
You can read our explainer explained by Google Gemini for a broad overview of Google's AI tools. But here we will break down the advanced Google Gemini features that are part of the new Google One AI Premium tier.
We'll explore how much this new cloud tier costs, plus all the AI features and benefits it brings, so you can decide whether you want to sign up or not. It was added as one of the Google One plans, so it also includes some digital cloud storage. Here's how Google One AI Premium is shaping up so far…
Google One AI Premium: price and availability
The Google One AI Premium plan is now available for purchase and will cost you $19.99 / £18.99 / AU$32.99 a month. Unlike other Google One plans, you can't pay annually to get a discount off the full price, but you can cancel whenever you want.
At the time of writing, Google is offering two-month free trials of Google One AI Premium, so you won't have to pay anything for the first two months. You can sign up and compare plans on the Google One site.
Google One AI Premium: features and benefits
First, you get 2TB of storage to use for all your Google services: Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. If you've been reaching the limits of the free storage plan (a measly 15GB), then that's another reason to upgrade.
You'll notice that there are a variety of other Google One plans available, offering storage from 2TB to 30TB, but only the Google One AI Premium plan comes with all the features of Gemini Advanced.
In addition to actual storage space, all Google One plans include priority support, 10% cashback on the Google Store, additional Google Photos editing features (including Magic Eraser), a dark web monitoring service that will look for any leaks of your personal information. and use of Google One VPN.
You're here for the AI features, though, and the key part of Google One AI Premium is that you have access to Gemini Advanced: that means the “most capable” version of Google's Gemini model, known as Ultra 1.0. You can think of it as paying for ChatGPT Plus compared to sticking with the free ChatGPT plan.
Google describes Gemini Ultra 1.0 as offering “next-generation performance” capable of handling “highly complex tasks”—tasks that can involve text, images, and code. It is possible to have longer conversations with Gemini Advanced and it also understands context better. If you want the most powerful AI Google has to offer, this is it.
“The largest model, Ultra 1.0, is the first to outperform human experts in MMLU (massively multitasking language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects, including mathematics, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics, to “assess knowledge and problem-solving capabilities,” writes Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
The dedicated Google Gemini app for Android and the Gemini features built into the Google app for iOS are available to everyone, whether they pay for a subscription or not, and the same goes for the web interface. However, if you have the premium plan, you'll get the top Ultra 1.0 model in all of these places.
By the way, a standard 2TB Google One plan, with everything from photo editing tricks to VPN, but without AI, will set you back $9.99 / £7.99 / AU$19.99 a month, for so you're effectively paying $10 / £11 / AU$13 for Gemini Advanced.
Gemini integration with Google productivity apps, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Meet, and Google Slides, will be “available soon,” Google says, and when it's available, you'll get it as part of the Google One AI Premium plan. It will help you compose your emails, design your slideshows, etc.
This is a renaming of the Duet AI features that Google previously rolled out to users of its apps and is now known as Gemini for Workspace. However, whether you are an individual or business user, you will be able to get these built-in AI tools if you sign up for the Google One AI Premium plan.
There you have it: Beyond the standard 2TB Google One plan, the main takeaway is that you get access to Google's latest and greatest Gemini AI features, and the company promises there will be many more on the way in the future. , also.
Google One AI Premium Early Verdict
On the one hand, the two-month free trial of Google's One AI Premium plan (which contains Gemini Advanced) seems like a no-brainer for those who want to play with some of the most powerful AI tools available right now. As long as you're pretty disciplined about canceling unwanted free trials, of course.
But it's also still very early for Gemini Advanced. We haven't been able to test it or compare it with ChatGPT Plus yet. Its integration with Google's productivity apps will also be “available soon,” so it's not yet clear when that will happen.
If you want to dig deeper into the performance of Google's latest AI models, including Gemini Advanced, you can read the company's Gemini benchmarking report. Some lucky testers, like AI professor Ethan Mollick, have also been playing with Gemini Advanced for some time after gaining advanced access.
Early impressions seem to be that Gemini Advanced is shaping up to be a GPT-4 class AI competitor that is capable of competing with ChatGPT Plus for demanding tasks like coding and advanced problem solving. It also promises to integrate very well with Google applications. How well it actually does is something we'll have to wait a bit to find out, but that free trial is there for early adopters who want to dive right in.
