Welcome back to Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech update from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. Your comments, questions, and suggestions are most welcome: Write to me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com.
First up, four fresh Fast Company tech stories for you:
- These 5 robots of the future could make our cities better
- Intuitive Machines: How this Houston startup is making space history
- Can Apple see what you’re doing when you wear your Vision Pro?
- These 3 AI-powered email tools are huge time-savers
A year ago, the era of generative AI chatbots was new, and sitting around with your mouth agape was a perfectly understandable reaction. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was amazing! In some ways, Bing Chat—which drizzled Microsoft special sauce on the same large language model as ChatGPT—was even more amazing! As for Google’s Bard . . . well, it was slightly less amazing than ChatGPT and Bing. But given Google’s formidable AI chops, there was every reason to think it might catch up quick.
As the sheer novelty of these chatbots has faded, a more mundane matter has emerged: Are they worth paying for? That question moved back to the front of my brain last week when Google introduced a new chatbot aimed squarely at the folks who may currently be subscribing to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus.
Google’s paid bot, Gemini Advanced, is part of a new tier of its Google One service and arrives amid a rebranding of the company’s existing AI offerings. (The free bot formerly known as Bard is now plain old Gemini; Duet AI, a collection of business-focused tools, is in the process of being renamed Gemini for Workspace.) For $20 a month, Google One AI Premium offers Gemini Advanced, 2 TB of Google Drive cloud storage, extra features for Google Photos and other apps, and security aids such as a VPN. Subscribers will also be able to use Gemini Advanced inside Gmail, Google Docs, and other apps; that integration is “coming soon,” Google promises.
All this costs $20 a month, matching what you’d pay for ChatGPT Plus alone. Google is even offering an uncommonly generous two-month free trial.
Under the surface, Gemini Advanced leverages Gemini 1.0 Ultra, Google’s most powerful LLM. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick says it’s “roughly equivalent [to OpenAI’s GPT-4], though it has its own strengths and weaknesses.” He knows as much as anyone about how major AI products compare. But my first few days with Google’s new bot didn’t leave me tempted to reallocate the $20 I’m currently paying for GPT Plus. (Full disclosure: Fast Company is nice enough to reimburse me, but I’m not about to expense two $20 chatbots per month.)