The AI race continues as AI giants like OpenAI and Google continue to release new models. It's been months since Google released the early access for Bard in March 2023. A better version, Google Bard Advanced, might come in early 2024, but it will cost you.
Google Bard Advanced
Google already announced that the advanced version of Bard will arrive in 2024, so this has already been an anticipated release. New information came to light when X user Bedros Pamboukian discovered a code that revealed more about the upcoming model.
Based on his post, Google Bard Advanced will be free for the first three months, meaning that you'll be paying for it after the free trial if you want to keep using it. You might also need Google One to subscribe to the service, as mentioned in Engadget.
hi, bard advanced will be free for 3 months and you'll need Google One too, enjoysies
— Bedros Pamboukian (@bedros_p) January 3, 2024
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
When Bard Advanced was announced, it was the same time that Google announced its new and more advanced AI model called Gemini, which the company says is a hypercomputer from Google Cloud. It comes in various tiers, all of which have different levels of computing power.
With what the search engine giant described as something that can "seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models," it comes in Gemini Ultra, Gemini Nano, and Gemini Pro.
The current version of Bard is using the latter. If you check on Google's blog post about Gemini, you'll notice that there's a fourth tier called Gemini Ultra, which is apparently the most powerful of all the options that Gemini has to offer.
There's not much to know about it and it isn't available to users, but that's Google is saving it for Bard Advanced. The most advanced model will power the company's latest version of Bard, which could encourage users to pay for the service.
Currently, the only thing we know about the upcoming chatbot is that it might be a paid service and that you'll need Google One to access it, and it's all unofficial for now. Since they said that it will be released early this year, we might see it in action by the first quarter of 2024.
Google's Gemini AI Model
The company has been scrambling to create an AI model that would top the market. After all, reports say that Google Bard was in response to the release of ChatGPT. With the latest advancements, it looks like Google is catching up.
Gemini is the culmination of the collaborative efforts of teams in the company, and was built to be multimodal. That means that Gemini will not just accept text prompts, but other kinds of media as well like images, videos, and audio.
With these capabilities, the AI model is made to better understand complicated information and answer more complex questions. All those abilities can be applied to written and visual information that users may feed the AI model and can do so despite the user giving it vast amounts of data.
