Google Bard Advanced is coming, but it likely won’t be free

Google Bard Advanced is coming, and it may represent the company’s first attempt to charge for an AI chatbot. The code on Bard’s website shows the opportunity to get three months free of Bard Advanced — implying that it will come at a cost after that. X (formerly Twitter) user Bedros Pamboukian shared the discovered code, which also includes a defunct Google One link. This could mean that users will be required to get a Google One subscription to access Bard Advanced.

Google first announced Bard Advanced in December 2023 alongside the new AI large language model Gemini and an AI hypercomputer from Google Cloud. Gemini is Google’s most capable model to date, with the ability to “seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained in a blog post. Gemini has three sizes: Gemini Ultra, Gemini Nano and Gemini Pro, with Bard using the latter. Gemini Ultra isn’t publicly available yet, but Google has stated that it will be the force behind Bard Advanced.

As for Bard Advanced’s availability, the aforementioned code suggests it could be tied to Google One (although it’s unclear what subscription tier would be required) but no details have been confirmed as of this writing. Google is currently testing its capabilities with a small group (which also might be why the code is visible). There’s no exact release date for Bard Advanced yet, but Google said in December that it would be available “early next year,” so it could launch at any time.