Google May Charge You to Use Bard Advanced When It Arrives in Early 2024

Google’s Bard Advanced chatbot — a more powerful version of the service that competes with Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT — might not be free to use, according to details spotted by a developer. Google does not have a very good record when it comes to keeping details of its upcoming products a secret, and now some additional details related the advanced version of its Bard AI chatbot have surfaced online that suggest users will have to eventually pay to access Bard Advanced.

Spotted by developer Bedros Pamboukian (via Android Authority) on X (formerly known as Twitter), the code on the Google Bard website contains references to Bard Advanced. The first sentence states “Try Bard Advanced for 3 months, on us.” A second sentence reads, ” Get more capable large language models with advanced math and reasoning skills with Bard Advanced for 3 months on us.”

These lines of code state that Bard Advanced will be offered as part of a three-month trial, suggesting that users will have to pay to continue using Bard Advanced after the free trial period. It is currently unclear when the company will roll out the most advanced version of Bard — it announced an “early 2024” launch date for the service back in December.

Pamboukian also points out in a subsequent tweet that Bard Advanced could also be linked to the company’s Google One subscription. Upon inspecting Bard’s source code from a browser, a Google One URL — currently broken at the time of publishing this story — suggests that Bard Advanced could either be included as part of a Google One subscription or be available as a separate purchase.

Bard Advanced was announced last month by the company when it unveiled Gemini AI, the company’s most powerful AI model to date. Recent reports suggested that Google would use Gemini Nano to provide Pixie, an AI assistant exclusive to Pixel smartphones, while Bard and Bard Advanced will be powered by Gemini Pro and Gemini Ultra, respectively. The latter is expected to arrive in the coming weeks, in line with Google’s “early 2024” release window.