Google AI Ultra

https://blog.google/products/google-one/google-ai-ultra/

by mfiguiere • 1 year ago

320 326 1 year ago

codydkdc2• 1 year ago

I really want Google to launch a Claude Code/OpenAI Codex CLI alternative. also if they included a small VM in one of these subscriptions I'd seriously consider it!

boole1854• 1 year ago

They are working on it: https://jules.google/

unshavedyak• 1 year ago

I got the feeling Jules was targeted at Web (ala Github) PR workflows. Is it not?

The Claude Code UX is nice imo, but i didn't get the impression Jules is that.

incognito124• 1 year ago

https://firebase.studio/

arresin2• 1 year ago

It’s absolutely garbage. I was annoyed because there’s a lot of hype on Reddit.

johnmlussier• 1 year ago

I’m not interested in about 75% of this offering. Really wish they had pieced this out or done a credit system for it all. I want higher coding and LLM limits, Deep Think, and would like to try agent stuff, but don’t care at all about image or video generation, Notebook limits, YouTube Premium, or more storage.

$250 is a the highest cost AI sub now. Not loving this direction.

camillomiller2• 1 year ago

What other direction would you expect to be possible? Even with this rates most AI companies are still bleeding money.

piskov2• 1 year ago

If anyone it’s Google that would be very-very inference efficient (given their custom TPUs and what have you).

However if all this power is wasted on video generation, then even them probably will choke.

Then again, I guess your average Joe/Jane will looove to generate some 10 seconds of you daily whatsapp stuff to share.

karmakurtisaani• 1 year ago

I wonder how long this free access to LLMs can continue. It's like early days of Facebook, before the ads and political interference started to happen. The question is, when will we see the enshittification of LLMs?

Workaccount23• 1 year ago

I'm assuming their will be an ala carte API offer too.

causal• 1 year ago

Yeah it says "designed for coding" but it's missing the one thing programmers need which is just higher Gemini API usage limits.

_heimdall• 1 year ago

Building and running these models is expensive, there's no way around that in the near future.

LLM companies have just been eating the cost in hopes that people find them useful enough while drastically subsidized that they stay on the hook when prices actually cover the expense.

linsomniac• 1 year ago

At $125/mo for 3 months I'm tempted to try it, but I don't understand how it would interfere with my existing youtube/2TB storage family plan, and that's a big barrier for me.

paxys7• 1 year ago

What's wrong with just using the API for that?

logicchains• 1 year ago

Deep Think isn't available on the API.

lallysingh• 1 year ago

$250 a month. Oh my.

akomtu• 1 year ago

"Rent a brain for only $250/mo"

croes4• 1 year ago

Rent a hallucinating brain

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

About an hour of a senior developer's fully-loaded cost.

paxys7• 1 year ago

And less than an hour of an external consultant's time.

throwaway20376• 1 year ago

To be clear, 8hrs/day, 40hrs/week, 50weeks/year is about 2,000 hours. Are you really saying that "senior developers" make 250USD * 2,000 = 500K USD? 250K is more like it, and only in very high cost locations -- Silicon Valley or NYC. More like 150K in rich countries, but not the richest city. Hell, 100K EUR can get you some very good developers on the European continent.

piskov2• 1 year ago

Given the lack of comments after an hour passed, we have a strong case of maybe five Google AI Ultra subscribers worldwide.

I, personally, try to stay as far as possible from google: Kagi for search, Brave for browsing (Firefox previously), Pro on OpenAI, etc.

We’ll see how fair OpenAI will be with tracking and what have you (given “off” for improve for everyone), but Google? Nah.

rohansood15• 1 year ago

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

sunaookami• 1 year ago

This is an urban legend btw, Thomas Watson never said that.

__natty__• 1 year ago

YouTube Premium: An individual YouTube Premium plan lets you watch YouTube and listen to YouTube Music ad-free, offline and in the background.

It seems weird to me, they included entertainment service in „work” related plan.

jihadjihad• 1 year ago

They don't even have the decency to make it a family plan, either.

Aeolun• 1 year ago

The whole family can get it for only $996/month

dewey• 1 year ago

It's not though, it's just the highest tier of the regular "Google One" account that also has Google Photos etc. included.

kumarm• 1 year ago

So everyone who want Youtube Premium can explain to their boss why they need Gemini AI Ultra for work?

Keyframe• 1 year ago

Hmm, interesting. There's basically no information what makes Ultra worth that much money in concrete terms except "more quota". One interesting tidbid I've noticed is that it seems Google One (or what is it called now) also carries sub for youtube. So far, I'm still on "old" Google One for my family and myself storage and have a separate youtube subscription for the same. I still haven't seen a clear upgrade path, or even a discount based on how much I have left from the old subscription, if I ever choose to do so (why?).

edit: also google AI Ultra links leads to AI Pro and there's no Ultra to choose from. GG Google, as always with their "launches".

flakiness• 1 year ago

I believe Imagen 4 and Veo 3 (the newest image/video models) and the "deep think" variant are for Ultra only. (Is it worth it? It's a different question.)

skybrian• 1 year ago

I just tried it and Whisk seems to be using Imagen 4 and and Veo 2 when used without a subscription.

ComplexSystems• 1 year ago

The problem with all of these is that SOTA models keep changing. I thought about getting OpenAI's Pro subscription, and then Gemini flew ahead and was free. If I get this then sooner or later OpenAI or Anthropic will be back on top.

SirensOfTitan• 1 year ago

This is even the case with Gemini:

The Gemini 2.5 Pro 05/06 release by Google’s own reported benchmarks was worse in 10/12 cases than the 3/25 version. Google re routed all traffic for the 3/25 checkpoint to the 05/06 version in the API.

I’m also unsure who needs all of these expanded quotas because the old Gemini subscription had higher quotas than I could ever anticipate using.

magicalist• 1 year ago

I’m also unsure who needs all of these expanded quotas because the old Gemini subscription had higher quotas than I could ever anticipate using.

"Google AI Ultra" is a consumer offering though, there's no API to have quotas for?

MisterPea• 1 year ago

I'm afraid they're going to lower the limits once Ultra is available. I use Gemini Pro everyday for at least 2 hours but never hit the limit

airstrike2• 1 year ago

This 100%. Unless you are building a product around the latest models and absolutely must squeeze the latest available oomph, it's more advantageous to just wait a little bit.

pc863• 1 year ago

I am willing to pay for up to 2 models at a time but I am constantly swapping subscriptions around. I think I'd started and cancelled GPT and Claude subscriptions at least 3-4 times each.

xnx• 1 year ago

If I get this then sooner or later OpenAI or Anthropic will be back on top.

The Gemini subscription is monthly, so not too much lock-in if you want to change later.

Ancapistani7• 1 year ago

I wonder if there's an opportunity here to abstract away these subscription costs and offer a consistent interface and experience?

For example - what if someone were to start a company around a fork of LiteLLM? https://litellm.ai/

LiteLLM, out of the box, lets you create a number of virtual API keys. Each key can be assigned to a user or a team, and can be granted access to one or more models (and their associated keys). Models are configured globally, but can have an arbitrary number of "real" and "virtual" keys.

Then you could sell access to a host of primary providers - OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Groq, Grok, etc. - through a single API endpoint and key. Users could switch between them by changing a line in a config file or choosing a model from a dropdown, depending on their interface.

Assuming you're able to build a reasonable userbase, presumably you could then contract directly with providers for wholesale API usage. Pricing would be tricky, as part of your value prop would be abstracting away marginal costs, but I strongly suspect that very few people are actually consuming the full API quotas on these $200+ plans. Those that are are likely to be working directly with the providers to reduce both cost and latency, too.

The other value you could offer is consistency. Your engineering team's core mission would be providing a consistent wrapper for all of these models - translating between OpenAI-compatible, Llama-style, and Claude-style APIs on the fly.

Is there already a company doing this? If not, do you think this is a good or bad idea?

planetpluta• 1 year ago

I think the biggest hurdle would be complying with the TOS. Imagine that OpenAI etc would not be a fan of sharing quotas across individuals in this way

wild_egg• 1 year ago

Isn't that https://openrouter.ai? Or do you have something different in mind?

mrnzc• 1 year ago

I think what Langdock (YC-backed, https://www.langdock.com) offers might be matching to your proposal?!

chw9e2• 1 year ago

this is t3 chat from what i understand, but probably many people already doing this. this is a good approach for wrappers.

UncleOxidant• 1 year ago

You can just surf between Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, etc. using them for free. I can't see paying for any AI subscription at this point as the free models out there are quite good and are updated every few months (at least).

diggan2• 1 year ago

as the free models out there are quite good

Have you tried say O1 Pro Mode? And if you have, do you find it as good as whatever free models you use?

If you haven't, it's kind of weird to do the comparison without actually having tried it.

devjab• 1 year ago

I wonder why anyone would pay these days, unless its using features outside of the chatbot. Between Claude, ChatGPT, Mistral, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Deepseek and son on, how do you ever really run out of free "wannabe pro"?

Wowfunhappy6• 1 year ago

So subscribe for a month to whatever service is in the lead and then switch when something new comes along.

smeeth• 1 year ago

I hate hate hate putting Deep Think behind a paywall. It's an ease-of-use tax. I fully expect to be able to get it over API through Poe or similar for way cheaper.

Just have usage limit tiers!

lvl155• 1 year ago

Google is a bit tone deaf with these offerings. Are they interested in competing?

vFunct• 1 year ago

Does this include Gemini 2.5 Pro API access? What are the API limits?

I blew through my $40 monthly fee in Github Copilot Pro+ in a few hours. =^/

Workaccount23• 1 year ago

I suspect Google sees the writing on the wall, and needs to move to a more subscription based business model. I don't think the ad model of the internet is dead, but I also don't think it was particularly successful. People block ads rather than forgo those services, ads conditioned people to think everything on the internet is free, and the actual monetization of ad views makes people pretty uncomfortable.

So here we are, with Google now wading into the waters of subscriptions. It's a good sign for those who are worried about AI manipulating them to buy things, and a bad sign for those who like the ad model.

Is the future going to be everyone has an AI plan, just like a phone plan, or internet plan, that they shell out $30-$300/mo to use?

I honestly would greatly prefer it if it meant privacy, but many people seem to greatly prefer the ad-model or ad-subsidized model.

ETA: Subscription with ads is ad-subsidized. You pay less but watch more ads.

aceazzameen• 1 year ago

It will eventually be subscriptions PLUS ads combined.

continuational• 1 year ago

YouTube is probably the most expensive streaming app, and there are still ads (sponsored sections) in nearly every video.

ninininino• 1 year ago

They already do subs for YouTube w/o ads and for storage (email attachments + Google Photos + Google Drive), for Stadia while it was around.

jeffbee5• 1 year ago

This doesn't seem like new territory ("wading in"). This is an extension of the existing Google One plans to reach people with extreme demands.

Etheryte• 1 year ago

I think this is a bit too rose tinted glasses. Being a paying customer doesn't necessarily mean you won't get ads, look at Netflix for a start. Their cheapest paid tier still gets ads. The subscription model will be an addition to the ad revenue, not a replacement.

ljm• 1 year ago

It should mean that though.

Ads are well and truly the cancer on the service industry.

It’s an outright abuse to force ads and then make you pay for the bandwidth of those ads on your own plan to render them.

MichaelZuo• 1 year ago

How does this relate to the parent?

I don’t there was a claim that nobody would ever offer a partially subscription partially ad funded service.

skarz• 1 year ago

I wonder how viable the referral link/referrer code method is? Based on my own YouTube viewing habits it seems like a lot of prominent channels have gone that route. Seems like it could work for the web overall. Ads would no longer have to target via cookies or browsing history because you could just serve links or offer codes related to your site's content.

abtinf• 1 year ago

I also don't think [the ad model of google] was particularly successful.

Only on HN.

narrator• 1 year ago

Yeah, only a few trillion in revenue over the last decades including Facebook and others. Not particularly successful.

jonluca• 1 year ago

Actually hilarious, the distribution of comments on HN is truly bimodal

Workaccount23• 1 year ago

I mean that in that I don't think it lived up to what Google envisioned. People have extremely hostile views towards ads but have a full expectation that everything is just an account creation away, if not outright just given away.

30% of people who use Google don't view their ads. It's hard to call a business where 30% of people don't pay successful. The news agencies picked up on this years ago, and now it's all paywalls.

This doesn't even get into the downstream effects of needing to coax people into spending more time on the platform in order to view more ads.

netsharc• 1 year ago

Heh, although I'm a cheapskate, the ad-based world is a fucked up one. We now have an attention-economy, trying to keep you hooked on the content so "the platform" can serve you ads and earn money off you. And they do that by serving content that engages you, and apparently it's content that stirs up a lot of emotions.

"Worried about refugees? Here's some videos about refugees being terrible". Replace "refugee" with "people celebrating Genocide", etc, etc...

add-sub-mul-div2• 1 year ago

Is the future going to be everyone has an AI plan, just like a phone plan, or internet plan, that they shell out $30-$300/mo to use?

Not the people who haven't been trained to require the crutch.

kleiba• 1 year ago

These prices are nuts, in my opinion. It basically means that only companies can afford access to the latest offerings - this used to be the case for specialist software in the past (e.g., in the medical sector), but AI has the potential to be useful for anyone.

Not a good development.

esafak2• 1 year ago

And I think it is a good thing. If there are buyers, it means they are getting that much value out of it. That there is a market for it. Competition will bring prices down.

mschuster912• 1 year ago

Competition will do its thing and bring prices down.

It won't. For now the AI "market" is artificially distorted by billionaires and trillion-dollar companies dumping insane amount of cash into NVDA, but when the money spigot dries out (which it inevitably will) prices are going to skyrocket and stay there for a loooong time.

jeffbee5• 1 year ago

used to be the case for specialist software

I think that's a great example of how a competitive market drives these costs to zero. When solid modeling software was new Pro/ENGINEER cost ~$100k/year. Today the much more capable PTC Creo costs $3-$30k depending on the features you want and SOLIDWORKS has full features down to $220/month or $10/month for non-professionals.

gigaflop• 1 year ago

Off-topic, but I work 'around' PTC software, and am surprised to see them mentioned. Got much knowledge in the area?

On-topic, yeah. PTC sells "Please Call Us" software that, in Windchill's example, is big and chunky enough to where people keep service contracts in place for the stuff. But, the cost is justifiable to companies when the Windchill software can "Just Do PLM", and make their job of designing real, physical products so much more effective, relative to not having PLM.

Aurornis6• 1 year ago

It basically means that only companies can afford access to the latest offerings

The $20/month plan provides similar access. They hint that in the future the most intense reasoning models will be in the Ultra plan (at least at first). Paying more for the most intense models shouldn't be surprising.

There's plenty of affordable LLM access out there.

Calwestjobs• 1 year ago

Magics !

I do not know what that hate about 250 $ is, just flow is worth more.

leoh2• 1 year ago

I would agree, were I to use flow frequently; but I would guess it’s the most operationally expensive API for Google and they may be subsidizing it (and profit in general) via users that don’t use it (ie software developers).

AJRF• 1 year ago

Would love to know how many people end up on this plan.

If i had to guess, looking at the features I would have guessed 80 bucks. Absurdly high, but lots of little doodads and prototypes would make the price understandable at that price.

250?!

I actually find that price worrying because it points to a degree of unsustainability in the economics of the products weve gotten used to.

jeffbee5• 1 year ago

The long-standing Google One plan with 30TB of storage was already $150/mo, so your estimate was a bit low.

blagie• 1 year ago

I'm holding out for "Ultra Max Pro."

(Comment is on the horrible naming; good naming schemes plan ahead for next month's offerings)

kylehotchkiss• 1 year ago

Somehow, someway you’re gonna need a Dell or Apple Ultra Edition to use it.

ivape2• 1 year ago

Is this the only price to get Google Flow at? Any alternatives? That seemms like the killer app here.

adverbly• 1 year ago

Price point here is a bit too high... They have bundled so many things together into this that the sticker shock on the price is too much.

I get what they're trying to do but if they were serious about this they would include some other small subscriptions as well... I should get some number of free movies on YouTube per month, I should be able to cancel a bunch of my other subscriptions... I should get free data with this or a free phone or something... I could see some value if I could actually just have one subscription but I'm not going to spend $250 a month on just another subscription to add to the pile...

ehsankia• 1 year ago

They put anything that makes sense. I don't know if including random movies makes sense.

They got Youtube Premium which is like 15$. 30TB of storage, a bit excessive and no equivalent but 20TB is around 100$ a month.

highwaylights2• 1 year ago

I’m not seeing the relevance of YouTube and the One services to this at all.

I get that Big Tech loves to try to pull you into their orbit whenever you use one of their services, but this risks alienating customers who won’t use those unrelated services and may begrudge Google making them pay for them.

bezier-curve2• 1 year ago

For $250/mo I would hope it includes API access to Gemini 2.5 pro, but it's nice to want things.

highwaylights2• 1 year ago

I can’t see a way that anyone would be able to give uncapped access to these models for a fixed price (unless you mean it’s scoped to your own use and not for company use? Even then, that’s still a risk to the provider.)

bezier-curve2• 1 year ago

I use Msty a lot for personal use. I like its ability to fork conversations. Seems like a simple feature but even ChatGPT's UI, which everyone has tried to copy, is fairly limited by comparison.

pc863• 1 year ago

As a consumer it seems to me the low hanging fruit for these super-premium offerings is some substantial amount of API credits included every month. Back when API credits were a relatively new thing I used LLMs infrequently enough I just paid $5-10/mo for API credits and used a desktop UI to talk to ChatGPT.

Now they want $200, $250/mo which is borderline offensive, and you have to pay for any API use on top of that?

Aurornis6• 1 year ago

Putting API use into the monthly plans doesn't make a lot of business sense. The only people who would sign up specifically to use API requests on a monthly plan would be looking to have a lower overall bill, then they'd pay-per-request after that. It would be a net loss.

mrbluecoat• 1 year ago

Amusing they picked a deadly jellyfish attacking earth as their hero image

sharpshadow• 1 year ago

Technically more than one could use this subscription, if used through the same device. Also to make it available to users in not yet supported countries.

aylmao• 1 year ago

I can't decide how I feel about Google's design for this looking so Apple-y.

Didn't they just release Material Design Expressive a few days ago [1]? Instead of bold shapes, bold fonts and solid colors it gradients, simple lines, frosted glass, and a single, clean, sans-serif font here. The bento-box slides look quite Apple-y too [2]. Switch the Google Sans for SF Pro, pull back on the border radius a bit, and you've essentially got the Apple look. It does look great though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352

[2] https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-app-updates-io-20...

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

it makes sense if you believe that Google has zero business interest in UI/UX.

they've learned that they can shovel out pretty much anything and as long as they don't directly charge the end-user and they're able to put ads on it (or otherwise monetize it against the interest of the end user), they just don't care.

they've been criticized for years and years over their lack of standardization and relatively poorly-informed design choices especially when compared with Apple's HIG.

solomatov• 1 year ago

Is there a premium option to control which of your data will be used for training? Or is it implemented the same way as Gemini Pro?

rudedogg• 1 year ago

If anyone at Google cares, I’d pay for Gemini Pro (not this new $200+ ridiculousness) if they didn’t train on my chats in that case. I actually would like to subscribe..

j_maffe3• 1 year ago

There's already an option for that. The downside is you can't access your chat history.

submeta• 1 year ago

Google Ultra: USD 250. Claude Pro: 218 EUR ChatGPT Pro: 220 EUR

Not included: Perplexity, Openrouter, Cursor, etc

Wow. You gotta have lots of disposable income.

thenaturalist• 1 year ago

There are enough people who do. ;)

And from a business perspective, this is enabling people from solo freelancers to mid managers and others for a fraction of the time and cost required to outsource to humans.

Not that I am personally in favor of this, but I can very much see the economics in these offerings.

loudmax• 1 year ago

The target market for these offerings are corporations, or self-employed developers. If these tools really do make your developers more productive, $250 a month is easily justifiable. That's only $3000 per year, a fraction of the cost of a full time developer.

Obviously, the benefit is contingent on whether or not the models actually make your developers more productive.

catigula3• 1 year ago

Do any of these companies actually sell their products as developer replacements?

6510• 1 year ago

I hear it doesn't have to be productive right now, if you have deep pockets it is worth being familiar with the tools even if it is just in case.

mattfrommars• 1 year ago

$250 a month is still a lot of money in India to spend on a digital product.

ivm• 1 year ago

Yup, I was paying $225/mo for three Unity3D subscriptions (basic+iOS+Android) ten years ago, while earning less than $4k/mo – just considered it part of my self-employed expenses.

eastbound• 1 year ago

The goal is to capture all your disposable AI income, so they can starve the competitors. The goal is, as long as you subscribe to several, increase the price.

And you haven’t strung the price that stings yet.

ZeroTalent• 1 year ago

that $250/month can make you $20k/month if you do some automation and subjectively unethical things

lazharichir• 1 year ago

Like taking on a gazillion of contract work?

add-sub-mul-div2• 1 year ago

And this is still early days, the pre-enshittification era.

paxys7• 1 year ago

This isn't a luxury purchase. If you aren't able to increase your income by $250/mo using these tools or otherwise get $250/mo worth of value out of them then you shouldn't sign up.

i_love_retros• 1 year ago

This is all a bit silly

qweiopqweiop• 1 year ago

Am I the only one getting the AI fatigue?

hammock• 1 year ago

Don’t worry, everyone is. That is why they are switching to quantum soon

charles_f2• 1 year ago

Quantum AI on the blockchain, now in Rust.

tsujamin• 1 year ago

Obviously not speaking for others experience, but it all makes me feel pretty fatigued, and as if this growing expectation of "AI-enhanced productivity" is coming at the expense of a craft and process (writing software) that I enjoy.

throwaway20376• 1 year ago

Real question: Did painters feel the same in the mid to late 1800s? In reality, photography didn't displace painting, it just became a new art form. Maybe LLM-written software will be similar.

zhivota• 1 year ago

Ok so I have Google One AI or whatever the previous version of this is called, and what's wild to me is that in Google Sheets, if I ask it to do anything, literally anything, it says it can't do it. The only thing it can do is read a sheet's data and talk about it. It can't help you form formulas, add data to the sheet, organize things, anything, as far as I've seen.

How does Google have the best models according to benchmarks but it can't do anything useful with them? Sheets with AI assist on things like pivot tables would be absolutely incredible.

noosphr• 1 year ago

How does Google have the best models according to benchmarks but it can't do anything useful with them?

KPI driven development with no interest in killing their cash cow.

These are the people who sat on transformers for 5 years because they were too afraid it would eat their core business, e.g. Bert.

One need look at what Bell Labs did to magnetic storage to realize that a monopoly isn't good for research. In short: we could have had mass magnetic storage in the 1920s/30s instead of 50s/60s.

A pop sci article about it: https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-ye...

catigula3• 1 year ago

I mean there's an article in Fortune magazine about the people pushing transformer "research" building doomsday bunkers.

Making Google look like the mature person in the room is a tall order but it seems to have been filled.

wrs• 1 year ago

The AI assistant in Sheets doesn’t understand how even the basic features work. When it’s not saying it lacks basic knowledge, it hallucinates controls that don’t exist. Why even bother having it there?

zb3• 1 year ago

Good good, please buy it so I can continue using Gemini for free.

retep_kram• 1 year ago

Given that the AI scene is not stable at all in the current moment (every day a new release that make last month's obsolete), any offer that tries to lock you with a model or model provider is a bad idea.

Pay-per-use for the moment, until market consolidation and/or commoditization.

Aurornis6• 1 year ago

any offer that tries to lock you with a model or model provider is a bad idea.

It's a monthly plan that you can cancel at any time. Not really locking in.

sandspar• 1 year ago

30TB of Google storage is a soft lock-in. If you fill it up you're kinda stuck.

charles_f2• 1 year ago

This is the kind of pricing that I expect most AI companies are gonna try to push for, and it might get even more expensive with time. When you see the delta between what's currently being burnt by OpenAI and what they bring home, the sweet point is going to be hard to find.

Whether you find that you get $250 worth out of that subscription is going to be the big question

Ancapistani7• 1 year ago

I agree, and the problem is that "value" != "utilization".

It costs the provider the same whether the user is asking for advice on changing a recipe or building a comprehensive project plan for a major software product - but the latter provides much more value than the former.

How can you extract an optimal price from the high-value use cases without making it prohibitively expensive for the low-value ones?

Worse, the "low-value" use cases likely influence public perception a great deal. If you drive the general public off your platform in an attempt to extract value from the professionals, your platform may never grow to the point that the professionals hear about it in the first place.

garrickvanburen• 1 year ago

this is the problem Google search originally had.

They successfully solved it with an advertising....and they also had the ability to cache results.

jsheard2• 1 year ago

I wonder who will be the first to bite the bullet and try charging different rates for LLM inference depending on whether it's for commercial purposes. Enforcement would be a nightmare but they'd probably try to throw AI at that as well, successfully or not.

typewithrhythm• 1 year ago

Value capture pricing is a fantasy often spouted by salesmen, the current era AI systems have limited differentiation, so the final cost will trend towards the cost to run the system.

So far I have not been convinced that any particular platform is more than 3 months ahead of the competition.

rangestransform• 1 year ago

See: nvidia product segmentation by VRAM and FP64 performance, but shipping CUDA for even the lowliest budget turd MX150 GPU. Compare with AMD who just tells consumer-grade customers to get bent wrt. GPU compute

AbstractH242• 1 year ago

But both are of tremendous value to advertisers

Much like social media, this will end in “if you aren’t paying for the product, then you are the product.”

tmaly2• 1 year ago

I pay for both ChatGPT and Grok at the moment. I often find myself not using them as much as I had hoped for the $50 a month it is costing me. I think if I were to shell out $250 I best be using it for a side project that is bringing in cash flow. But I am not sure if I could come up with anything at this point given current AI capabilities.

morkalork• 1 year ago

Costs more than seats for Office 365, Salesforce and many productivity tools. I don't see management gleefully running to give access to whole departments. But then again, if you could drop headcount by just 1 on a team by giving it to the rest, you probably come out ahead.

EasyMark• 1 year ago

I feel prices will come down a lot for "viable" AI, not everyone needs the latest and greatest at rock-bottom prices. Assuming AGI is just a pipe-dream with LLMs as I suspect.

Wowfunhappy6• 1 year ago

When you see the delta between what's currently being burnt by OpenAI and what they bring home, the sweet point is going to be hard to find.

Moore's law should help as well, shouldn't it? GPUs will keep getting cheaper.

Unless the models also get more GPU hungry, but 2025-level performance, at least, shouldn't get more expensive.

dvt• 1 year ago

Moore's law should help as well, shouldn't it? GPUs will keep getting cheaper.

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought Moore's law doesn't apply to GPUs?

godelski3• 1 year ago

Not necessarily. The prevailing paradigm is that performance scales with size (of data and compute power).

Of course, this is observably false as we have a long list of smaller models that require fewer resources to train and/or deploy with equal or better performance than larger ones. That's without using distillation, reduced precision/quantization, pruning, or similar techniques[0].

The real thing we need is more investment into reducing computational resources to train and deploy models and to do model optimization (best example being Llama CPP). I can tell you from personal experience that there is much lower interest in this type of research and I've seen plenty of works rejected because "why train a small model when you can just tune a large one?" or "does this scale?"[1] I'd also argue that this is important because there's not infinite data nor compute.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05694

[1] Those works will out perform the larger models. The question is good, but this creates a barrier to funding. Costs a lot to test at scale, you can't get funding if you don't have good evidence, and it often won't be considered evidence if it isn't published. There's always more questions, every work is limited, but smaller compute works have higher bars than big compute works.

kllrnohj2• 1 year ago

GPUs will keep getting cheaper. [...] but 2025-level performance, at least, shouldn't get more expensive.

This generation of GPUs have worse performance for more $$$ than the previous generation. At best $/perf has been a flat line for the past few generations. Given what fab realities are nowadays, along with what works best for GPUs (the bigger the die the better), it doesn't seem likely that there will be any price scaling in the near future. Not unless there's some drastic change in fabrication prices from something

ivape2• 1 year ago

A developer will always get $250 worth of that subscription.

fellowniusmonk• 1 year ago

As someone who grew up very poor and first got access to email via Juno's free ad based email client.

I've seen so many people over the years just absolutely shit on ad based models.

But ad based models are probably the least regressive approach to commercial offerings that we've seen work in the wild.

I love ads. If you are smart you don't have to see them. If you are poor and smart you get free services without ads so you don't fall behind.

I notice that there are no free open source providers of LLM services at this point, it's almost as if services that have high compute costs have to be paid for SOME HOW.

Hopefully we get a Juno for LLM soon so that whole cycle can start again.

leoh2• 1 year ago

Ads have really harmed our society imo, despite having some advantages as you mention

danesparza• 1 year ago

I don't mean to be snarky, but is this announcement timed just so they take press away from the Microsoft Copilot announcement?

jonas21• 1 year ago

Today was the Google I/O keynote. The date was set months in advance.

Analemma_• 1 year ago

It’s exactly the opposite: the date for I/O was fixed months ago, Microsoft made their announcement to try and take press away from Google.

Ancapistani7• 1 year ago

I've toyed with Gemini 2.5 briefly and was impressed... but I just can't bring myself to see Google as an option as an inference provider. I don't trust them.

Actually, that's not true. I do trust them - I trust them to collect as much data as possible and to exploit those data to the greatest extent they can.

I'm deep enough into AI that what I really want is a personal RAG service that exposes itself to an arbitrary model at runtime. I'd prefer to run inference locally, but that's not yet practical for what I want it to do, so I use privacy-oriented services like Venice.ai where I can. When there's no other reasonable alternative I'll use Anthropic or OpenAI.

I don't trust any of the big providers, but I'm realizing that I have baseline hostility toward Google in 2025.

nowittyusername• 1 year ago

Understanding that no outside provider is going to care about your privacy and will always choose to try and sell you their crappy advertisements and push their agenda on you is the first step in building a solution. In my opinion that solution will come in the form of a personalized local ai agent which is the gatekeeper of all information the user receives and sends to the outside world. A fully context aware agent that has the users interests in mind and so only provides user agreed context to other ai systems and also filters all information coming to the user from spam, agenda manipulation, etc... Basically a very advanced spam blocker of the future that is 100% local and fully user controlled and calibrated. I think we should all be either working on something like this if we want to keep our sanity in this brave new world.

Ancapistani7• 1 year ago

Exactly.

To be clear, I don't trust Venice either . It just seems less likely to me that they would both lie about their collection practices and be able to deeply exploit the data.

I definitely want locally-managed data at the very least.

CSMastermind2• 1 year ago

I pay for OpenAI Pro but this is a clear no for me. I just don't get enough value out of Gemini to justify a bump from $20 / month to $250.

If they really want to win they should undercut OpenAI and convince people to switch. For $100 / month I'd downgrade my OpenAI Pro subscription and switch to Gemini Ultra.

radicality• 1 year ago

It does look like it comes with a few other perks that would normally cost a bunch too, specifically, 30TB of Google drive storage

airstrike2• 1 year ago

Yeah, no, thanks for the cross-sell but I'm not interested.

jameslk• 1 year ago

It’s the modern day Comcast Triple Play: internet, cable, and phone

croes4• 1 year ago

Doesn’t matter if you have no use for these 30TB

J_Shelby_J• 1 year ago

If they really want to win, they should make a competitor for O1-pro. It’s worth $200 to reduce LLM babysitting needs by %10.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

Perhaps they're not interested in beating OpenAI in the business of selling $1 for $0.50.

CSMastermind2• 1 year ago

Sure but failure to capture marketshare now could easily snowball into larger failure of the business later.

crowbahr• 1 year ago

I mean OpenAI already loses money on their Pro line. So it's less selling $1 for $0.50 and more selling $1 for $0.25 because the guy down the street sells it for $0.50

hackrmn2• 1 year ago

Ok, this reminds me of that Black Mirror episode,

*spoilers ahead*

where the lady had a fatal tumor cut out for emergency procedure, only for it to be replaced by a synthetic neural network used by a cloud service with a multi-tier subscription model where even the basic features are "conveniently" shoved into a paying tier, up until the point she's on life support after being unable to afford even the basic subscription.

Life imitates art.

j_maffe3• 1 year ago

wdym life imitates art? This is exactly what the episode was about lol

johnisgood5• 1 year ago

Art imitates life!

hackrmn2• 1 year ago

I was referring to Google's AI Ultra "imitating" Black Mirror (knowingly or not).

OtherShrezzing2• 1 year ago

The global average salary is somewhere in the region of $1500.

There’s lots of people and companies out there with $250 to spend on these subscriptions per seat, but on a global scale (where Google operates), these are pretty niche markets being targeted. That doesn’t align well with the multiple trillions of dollars in increased market cap we’ve seen over the last few years at Google, Nvda, MS etc.

paxys7• 1 year ago

New technology always starts off available to the elite and then slowly makes its way down to everyone. AI is no different.

dimitrios1• 1 year ago

This is one of those assumed truisms that turns out to be false upon close scrutiny, and there's a bit of survivorship bias in the sense that we tend to look at the technologies that had mass appeal and market forces to make them cheaper and available to all. But theres tons of new tech thats effectively unobtainable to the vast majority of populations, heck even nation states. With the current prohibitive costs (in terms of processing power, energy costs, data center costs) to train these next generation models, and the walled gardens that have been erected, there's no reason to believe the good stuff is going to get cheaper anytime soon, in my opinion.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

The technology itself is not useful. What they're really selling is the data it was trained on. Most of which was generated by students and the working class. So there's a unique extra layer of exploitation in these pricing models.

pier25• 1 year ago

Do you have a source for the $1500 number? Seems pretty high.

bradleybuda• 1 year ago

It's 6x that. The median is 2x: https://chatgpt.com/share/682ceb2a-b56c-800b-b49d-1a24c48709...

Aurornis6• 1 year ago

The global average salary is somewhere in the region of $1500.

The global average salary earner isn't doing a computer job that benefits from AI.

I don't understand the point of this comparison.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

The global average salary earner isn't doing a computer job that benefits from AI.

Do you mean the current half baked implementations or just the idea of AI in general?

I don't understand the point of this comparison.

I don't understand the point of "AI."

OtherShrezzing2• 1 year ago

The story being told at Wall Street is that this is a once-in-an-era revolution in work akin to the Industrial Revolution. That’s driving multiple trillions of dollars in market cap into the companies in AI markets.

That story doesn’t line up with a product whose price point limits it to fewer than 25-50mn subscriptions shared between 5 inference vendors.

Quarrel• 1 year ago

The $250 is just rate limiting at the moment. It isn't a real price; I doubt it is based on cost-recovery or what they think the market can bare.

They need users to make them a mature product, and this rate-limits the number of users while putting a stake in the ground to help understand the "value" they can attribute to the product.

julianpye2• 1 year ago

Why do people keep on saying that corporations will pay these price-tags? Most corporations really keep a very tight lid on their software license costs. A $250 license will be only provided for individuals with very high justification barriers and the resulting envy effects will be a horror for HR. I think it will be rather individuals who will be paying out of their pocket and boosting their internal results. And outside of those areas in California where apples cost $5 in the supermarket I don't see many individuals capable of paying these rates.

troupo• 1 year ago

Corps will likely negotiate bulk pricing and discounts, with extra layers of guarantees like "don't use and share our data" on top

bryanlarsen3• 1 year ago

"AI will make us X% more productive. 100%-X% of you are fired, the rest get a $250/month license".

kulahan• 1 year ago

I don’t see any benefit to removing humans in order to achieve the exact same level of efficiency… wouldn’t that just straight-up guarantee a worse product unless your employees were absolutely all horrendous to begin with?

throwaway20376• 1 year ago

I foresee a slightly different outcome: If companies can genuinely enhance worker productivity with LLMs (for many roles, this will be true), then they can expand their business without hiring more people. Instead of firing, they will slow the rate of hiring. Finally, the 250 USD/month license isn't that much of a cost burden if you start with the most senior people, then slowly extend the privilege to lower and lower levels, carefully deciding if the role will be positively impacted by access to a high quality LLM. (This is similar to how Wall Street trading floors decide who gets access to expensive market data via Reuters or Bloomberg terminal.)

For non-technical office jobs, LLMs will act like a good summer intern, and help to suppress new graduate hiring. Stuff like HR, legal, compliance, executive assistants, sales, marketing/PR, and accounting will all greatly benefit from LLMs. Programming will take much longer because it requires incredibly precise outputs.

One low hanging fruit for programming and LLMs: What if Microsoft creates a plug-in to the VBA editor in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.) that can help to write VBA code? For more than 25 years, I have watched non-technical people use VBA, and I have generally been impressed with the results. Sure, their code looks like shit and everything has hard-coded limits, but it helps them do their work faster. It is a small miracle what people can teach themselves with (1) a few chapters of a introductory VBA book, (2) some blog posts / Google searches, and (3) macro recording. If you added (4) LLM, then it would greatly boost the productivity of Microsoft Office power users.

verdverm5• 1 year ago

We just signed up to spend $60+/month for every dev to have access to Copilot because the ROI is there. If $250/month save several hours per month for a person, it makes financial sense

delusional2• 1 year ago

We signed up for that too. 2 quaters later the will to pay is significantly lower.

tacker2000• 1 year ago

How are you measuring this? How do you know it is paying off?

julianpye2• 1 year ago

Okay, but you're in a S/W team in a corp, where everyone's main task is to code. A coding agent has clear benefits here.

This is not the usecase of AI Ultra.

Aurornis6• 1 year ago

This isn't really out of line with many other SaaS licenses that companies pay for.

This also includes things like video and image generation, where certain departments might previously have been paying thousands of dollars for images or custom video. I can think of dozens of instances where a single Veo2/3 video clip would have been more than good enough to replace something we had to pay a lot of money and waste of a lot of time acquiring previously.

You might be comparing this to one-off developer tool purchases, which come out of different budgets. This is something that might come out of the Marketing Team's budget, where $250/month is peanuts relative to all of the services they were previously outsourcing.

I think people are also missing the $20/month plan right next to it. That's where most people will end up. The $250/month plan is only for people who are bumping into usage limits constantly or who need access to something very specific to do their job.

browningstreet• 1 year ago

The big problem for companies is that every SaaS vendor they use wants to upsell AI add-on licensing upgrades. Companies won’t buy the AI option for every app they’re licensing today. Something will have to give.

ethbr15• 1 year ago

BYOLLM is the future.

Nobody outside of the major players (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Salesforce) has enough product suite eyeball time to justify a first-party subscription.

Most companies didn't target it in their first AI release because there was revenue laying on the ground. But the market will rapidly pressure them to support BYOLLM in their next major feature build.

They're still going to try to charge an add-on price on top of BYOLLM... but that margin is going to compress substantially.

Which means we're probably t minus 1 year from everyone outside the above mentioned players being courted and cut revenue-sharing deals in exchange for making one LLM provider their "preferred" solution with easier BYOLLM. (E.g. Microsoft pays SaaS Vendor X behind the scenes to drive BYOLLM traffic their way)

MandieD• 1 year ago

When Docker pulled their subscription shenanigans, the global auto parts manufacturer I work for wasn't delighted when they saw $5 (or was it 7?)/month/user, but were ready to suck it up for a few hundred devs.

They noped right out when it turned out to be more like $20/month/user, not payable by purchase order, and instead spent a developer month cobbling together our own substitute involving Windows Subsystem for Linux, because it would pay off within two months.

ir77• 1 year ago

people here keep saying that this is targeted at big companies/corporations. the big company that i work for explicitly block uploads of data to these services and we're forbidden to put anything company related in there for many reasons, even if you use your own account, we don't have 'company accounts'.

so no, i can't see companies getting all excited about buying $250mo/user licenses for their employees for google or chatgpt to suck in their proprietary data.

verdverm5• 1 year ago

These subscriptions explicitly do not suck in your proprietary data, it's all laid out in their ToS.

quantumHazer• 1 year ago

Yeah, and who will make them accountable? How can you verify that they’re noteworthy stealing your data anyways? This companies don’t give a shit about copyright or privacy.

ndriscoll2• 1 year ago

I don't think I've ever worked somewhere where you wouldn't get fired for sending company data to a party that doesn't have an NDA signed with the company, regardless of whatever ToS they have.

sigmaisaletter• 1 year ago

The same companies who stole... sorry.. fair-used all the worlds artworks and all text on the internet to train their models are now promising you they won't steal...sorry... fair-use your uploaded data?

In unrelated matters, I have a bridge to sell you, if you are interested.

croes4• 1 year ago

They say that, but how would you know if they lie?

Havoc2• 1 year ago

There are enterprise offerings that solve that. Guarantees that the data won’t be trained on etc.

I’m at a major financial company and we’ve had access to ChatGPT for over a year along with explicit approval to upload anything while it’s in enterprise mode

It’s a solved problem - technical, regulatory, legal.

bdangubic• 1 year ago

no sane company would go for this with proprietary data - local models only. the “solved problem - technical, regulatory, legal” is that… until it isn’t … and that time always comes

throwaway20376• 1 year ago

We have the same for GitLab Duo. Again, I work for a "global mega-corp" who would never want to leak their internal data. Do you know if your ChatGPT runs on-prem? I wondered that about our GitLab Duo access.

spaceman_2020• 1 year ago

Honestly, at this point, nation states will have to figure out an AI strategy. Poorer countries where the locals can't afford cutting edge AI tools will find themselves outproduced by wealthier workers.

dbspin• 1 year ago

Not just can't afford, but can't access. Most of these new AI tools aren't available outside the US.

Papazsazsa2• 1 year ago

I just tried it.

8 out of 10 attempts failed to produce audio, and of those only 1 didn't suck.

I suppose that's normal(?) but I won't be paying this much monthly if the results aren't better, or at least I'd expect some sort of refund mechanism.

Papazsazsa2• 1 year ago

Yeah, after messing around with it all day, it's awful. Someone rushed this out the door.

johnisgood5• 1 year ago

They are running out of ideas for names. What next, Google AI Ultra Max Pro?

loloquwowndueo• 1 year ago

You joke but don’t forget there’s an actual product called “product name” pro max (an iPhone lol)

johnisgood5• 1 year ago

Ffs... I actually had no idea lmao.

Well, that does make sense then.

Fergusonb• 1 year ago

That's a car payment...

backendEngineer• 1 year ago

All to put even more AI generated bs down our throats to sell us trash that we don't need and can't afford. God the roaring twenties can't catch a break.

MOARDONGZPLZ• 1 year ago

I use it to make meeting agendas.

icelancer• 1 year ago

I paid for it and Google Flow was upgraded to Ultra but Gemini still shows Pro, and asks for me to upgrade. When I go to "upgrade," it says I am already at Google Ultra.

Average Google product launch.

siliconc0w• 1 year ago

As long as these companies have an API, I imagine it's going to be cheaper to pay a la carte than pay monthly. $250 is a lot of API calls, especially as competition drives the cost lower. For stuff not behind an API, you're kinda shooting yourself in the foot because other providers might and at the very least it means developers aren't going to adopt it).

danenania2• 1 year ago

It might not be as many API calls as you think. Taking OpenAI as an example, if you're using the most expensive models like o3, gpt-4.5, o1-pro, etc. heavily for coding in large codebases with lots of context, you can easily spend hundreds per month, or even thousands.

So for now, the pro plans are a good deal if you're using one provider heavily, in that you can theoretically get like a 90% discount on inference if you use it enough. They are essentially offering an uncapped amount of inference.

That said, these companies have every incentive to gradually reduce the relative value offered by these plans over time to make them profitable, and they have many levers they can use to accomplish that. So in the long run, API costs and 'pro plan' costs will likely start to converge.

spondyl• 1 year ago

Can you... talk to a human for support? Perhaps I'm just used to SSO tax billing pages where I expect the right most column to mention that. I was partly expecting it because it'd be ironic to see people complaining that a model hallucinated only for some engineer at Google to shrug and be like "Nothing we can do about it"

paxys7• 1 year ago

Unless that human is an AI researcher at Google what support are you expecting?

macrolime• 1 year ago

It's Google. Obviously not.

throwaway20376• 1 year ago

    > Can you... talk to a human for support?

You raise an interesting point. I wonder if there is a (low margin) business waiting to be started that provides technical support for LLMs. As I understand, none of the major, commercial LLMs provide technical support (I don't count stuff like billing or password resets.). You could hire some motivated fresh grads in Philippines and India who speak English, then offer technical support for LLMs. It could be a subscription model (ideal) or per-incident (corps pay 1000 USD upfront, then each incident is 25 USD, etc.). Literally: They will help you write a better prompt for the LLM. I don't think it is a billion dollar business, but it might work. I also think you could easily attract fresh grads because they would be excited to using a wide variety of LLMs and can pad their CV/resume with all of this LLM prompting experience. (This will be a valuable skill going forward!)

arresin2• 1 year ago

Deep think, the only thing that’s interesting in the whole i/o day is not accessible via api.

Also I was hoping for a chatgpt test time search thing that. That is absolutely killer.

research_pie• 1 year ago

The YouTube Premium is hilarious.

danenania2• 1 year ago

For a limited time they're also throwing in a Sharper Image lava lamp.

bionhoward• 1 year ago

I think this could be worth it if:

we could have our chat histories with Gemini apps activity turned off (decouple the training from the storage) — including no googler eyeballs on our work chats (call this “confidential mode”)

Jules had a confidential mode for these folks (no googler eyeballs on our work code tasks)

Deep research connected to GitHub and was also confidential (don’t train on the codebase, don’t look at the codebase)

The other stuff (videos etc) are obviously valuable but not a big draw for me personally right now…

The biggest draw for me is trusting I can work on private code projects without compromise of security

ehnto• 1 year ago

Google, and the tech industry in general, has erased all trust I have in their ability to actually keep something confidential. They don't want to, and so they won't.

If they don't use some legal workaround to consume it from the outset, they'll just roll out an automatic opt in service or license change after you've already loaded all your data in.

It's negligence to trust any confidentiality provided by big tech, and they well and truly deserve that opinon.

croes4• 1 year ago

How would you know if the use your code to train their models?

The risk of being caught is minimal.

And history showed multiple times that companies lie.

Remember when nobody ever had access to the things people say to Alexa?

Came out, that wasn’t true.

Aeroi• 1 year ago

dear god

CommenterPerson• 1 year ago

Stop with the snark, people. Even we have to pay our electricity bills, ya know. We're not sure about the name for the next version though. Gemini keeps suggesting "Google AI Ultra Draft". What do you think?

protocolture• 1 year ago

Where is the plan that just removes all their AI tools from my view.

poisonta• 1 year ago

Not a fan of anything Google does these days.

bdelmas2• 1 year ago

Let's all cheer this new era coming. Soon or you pay half your salary for AI since it will be so advanced or you will be unemployed impossible to compete with people subscribed to AI. Sure it may not happen (exactly) this way but look at this pricing, 200+/month and the fact is it is just the beginning.

smoovb• 1 year ago

As a product manager who has been paying an overseas developer $4,000 a month, I'm getting quite close to replace him with a $100 a month Claude Max subscription. These high subscription costs are nothing compared to the low level employees that will be replaced or supplemented.

bdelmas2• 1 year ago

Oh yes for sure. That’s what is scary. A while back Google did a demo at their I/O event for a IA secretary. It was able to take calls for you, manage your agenda, etc… In 5 years I am sure you will have a secretary plus other jobs packed into this all included high cost subscription and AI will take more and parts of our professional and personal lives. It will be useful but oh boy it’s going to look dystopian.

tonyhart73• 1 year ago

they spend billions of dollar for running and develop this LLM

now we get to see the price tag after initial impression

pmcf• 1 year ago

And includes a YouTube subscription. Top that OpenAI!

pllbnk• 1 year ago

Given that Youtube Premium is ~$20 USD and 30 TB of space would cost ~$130 (extrapolating from current Google Workspace pricing), that leaves all the AI fluff costing $100 more. I can see some people taking that deal but after a while realizing they are not using them as much and canceling.

TuringNYC• 1 year ago

This grab-bag seems haphazard to me -- half the tools seem to be perfect for creators or creative professionals. Some of the other stuff seems to be for researchers or technologists. How often do people need all of this? Is this to make tiers/products simple?

Google AI Ultra

Related Stories