Google has been busy revamping its AI offerings, renaming Bard to Gemini, releasing a dedicated Android app, and much more. There’s also now a paid tier for Google’s generative AI engine for the first time, meaning you’ll still have to weigh up a digital subscription.
You can read our Google Gemini explainer for a broad overview of Google’s AI tools. But here we’ll break down the Google Gemini Advanced features that are part of the new Google One AI Premium tier.
We explore how much this new cloud tier costs, plus all the AI features and benefits it brings, so you can decide whether or not to sign up. It’s added as one of the Google One plans, so you get some digital cloud storage included too. Here’s how Google One AI Premium is developing so far…
Google One AI Premium: price and availability
The Google One AI Premium subscription is available to purchase now and costs $19.99 / £18.99 / AU$32.99 per month. Unlike some other Google One plans, you can’t pay annually to get a discount on the total price, but you can cancel at any time.
At the time of writing, Google is offering a two-month free trial 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 of all, you get 2TB of storage space that you can use across all your Google services: Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. If you’ve reached the limits of the free storage plan (a paltry 15 GB), then that’s another reason to upgrade.
You’ll notice some others Google One plans are available and offer storage from 2TB to 30TB, but only the Google One AI Premium plan comes with all Gemini Advanced features.
In addition to the actual storage, all Google One plans include priority support, 10% back in the Google Store, additional editing features for Google Photos (including Magic Eraser), a dark web monitoring service that looks for any leaks of your personal data, and usage from the Google One VPN.
It’s the AI features you’re here for, though, and the most important part of Google One AI Premium is that you get 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 a bit like paying for ChatGPT Plus, compared to the free ChatGPT subscription.
Google describes Gemini Ultra 1.0 as offering “state-of-the-art performance” capable of performing “highly complex tasks” – tasks that can include text, images and code. Longer conversations are possible 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 (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects – including math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics – to develop knowledge and troubleshooting testing 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 get the superior Ultra 1.0 model in all these places.
Besides, a standard 2TB Google One subscription – with everything from the photo editing tricks to the VPN, but without the AI – will cost you $9.99 / £7.99 / AU$19.99 per month, so you’re essentially paying $10 / £11 / AU$13 for Gemini Advanced.
Gemini integration with Google’s productivity apps – including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Meet and Google Slides – will be “coming soon,” Google says, and when it becomes available you’ll get it as part of a Google One AI Premium subscription . It offers you help in composing your emails, designing your slideshows, and so on.
This is a rebrand of the Duet AI features that Google previously rolled out to users of its apps, and is now known as Gemini for Workspace. Whether you’re an individual or business user, you can get these integrated AI tools when you sign up for the Google One AI Premium subscription.
So there you have it: Besides the standard 2TB Google One plan, the most important thing is that you get access to Google’s latest and greatest Gemini AI features, and the company promises that there will be many more to come in the future. at.
Google One AI Premium asked for judgment
On the one hand, Google’s two-month free trial of the One AI Premium Plan (which includes Gemini Advanced) feels like a no-brainer for those looking to tinker with some of the most powerful AI tools available today. As long as you’re reasonably disciplined about canceling unwanted free trials, of course.
But it’s also still very early for Gemini Advanced. We haven’t tried it out or compared it to ChatGPT Plus yet. Integration with Google’s productivity apps is also only “coming soon,” so it’s not yet clear when that will happen.
If you want a deeper dive into the performance of Google’s latest AI models – including Gemini Advanced – you can read the company reports Gemini benchmarking report. Some lucky testers like AI professor Ethan Mollick have also been tinkering with Gemini Advanced for a while after gaining advanced access.
The first impression seems to be that Gemini Advanced is developing into a GPT-4 class AI candidate capable of competing with ChatGPT Plus for demanding tasks such as coding and advanced troubleshooting. It also promises to integrate nicely with Google’s apps. We’ll have to wait a while to find out how well it actually does that, but that free trial period is there for early adopters who want to dive right in.