Google Rebranded 'Bard' Chatbot as 'Gemini', and Rolled Out a Paid Subscription Model
February 8, 2024
IBL News | New York
Google rebranded its Bard chatbot as Gemini — the family of its foundation model —, launched in the U.S. Gemini Ultra 1.0 — priced at $20 per month — and issued a new Gemini app on iOS and Android, as Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, announced today.
The API access to the Ultra model will be available in the coming weeks.
The paid monthly subscription — the same price as ChatGPT 4 — will be available through a new bundle known as Google One Premium Plan that includes two terabytes of cloud storage — typically costing $9.99 monthly — and access to the Google Workspace apps like Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet. For now, users can get a two-month subscription trial at no cost.
With that, Google did sunset the Duet AI brand, which became Gemini for Workspace, responding to Microsoft and its partner OpenAI’s offerings in this manner.
“Gemini Ultra 1.0 is a model that sets the state of the art across a wide range of benchmarks across text, image, audio, and video,” Google’s Sissie Hsiao said in a press conference today.
“The largest model Ultra 1.0 is the first to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects — including math, physics, history, law, medicine, and ethics — to test knowledge and problem-solving abilities,” Sundar Pichai stated.
“Gemini Advanced can be a personal tutor, tailored to your learning style, or it can be a creative partner, helping you plan a content strategy or build a business plan, as explained in this post,” he added.
Many users said Bard provided middling results, making a rebrand almost a necessity, TechCrunch commented today.
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