Google Rebrands Bard as Gemini, Rolls Out $20 Paid Subscription

Google has renamed its AI assistant to "Gemini" and unveiled a paid subscription tier offering. The $19.99/month "Gemini Advanced" includes a more powerful AI model and cloud storage integration, targeting users seeking advanced content creation and complex query resolution. Google is also leveraging its Android user base by making Gemini the default digital assistant, aiming to replicate the success of its billion-user products.

That's a terrible name

[LinuxRulz]

That will make the gemini(https://geminiprotocol.net/) capsules even more ungooglable.

Re:

[nightflameauto]

That will make the gemini(https://geminiprotocol.net/) capsules even more ungooglable.

Thanks for this. I hadn't heard of it, and it seems an extremely appealing concept.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

Well, ChatGPT is also kind of terrible, but now everybody knows that name!

"What does GPT mean?" Yeah good luck explaining that to your non-computer-nerd friend.

My life was fine before Gemini existed.

[olsmeister]

It will continue to be just fine in the future without giving Google another $20 a month autopay.

Re:

[NewtonsLaw]

Of all the publicly accessible AI systems Bard is the worst by far. There's no way I'd pay $20 a month for it.

It is unbelievably "woke" and many of the responses to queries that do sneak past its firewall of "we must not offend" are just totally wrong.

Google are a long way behind in this area -- which probably explains why the AI behind all the moderation stuff-ups on YouTube is so bad.

Re:

[buck-yar]

What's the story behind this? Back in the day Google did a lot of academic research, didn't they? Google has 180k employees vs 2800 for Youtube. What do all the google employees do? Must be research because when I look at job openings at Google, what comes up are jobs like UI programmer. With the google interface being about as boring as can be and hasn't changed in 25 years, have to wonder what they all do? Must be a lot of money spent on research that other companies end up improving upon and profiting fr

Re:

[linuxguy]

> It is unbelievably "woke" and many of the responses to queries that do sneak past its firewall of "we must not offend" are just totally wrong.

What does that mean? How did it not offend you? Or do you mean others? How did it not offend others?

I will agree that Bard's technical capabilities are not very good when compared with others. I mostly use various AI services for software development related topics. All AI tools occasionally hallucinate. But Bard is in a league by itself.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

So far, Bard hasn't proven to me that it would be worth $20 a month, or even $5. Copilot, on the other hand, I actually *am* forking out $10 a month for, and I think it's a good deal.

I see what they did here

[CEC-P]

FYI, Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot or whatever, is minimum $30/mo and that's on top of an E5 license if I remember correctly. Otherwise it's higher. But remember the last 30 or so Google scams? Like Sketch-Up being free and then everyone at college learned it and then they started charging a fraction of autocad subscription price for it when all the dumb 20 year olds showed up to my company not knowing how to use AutoCAD and demanding we switch to Sketch-Up just for them. Same vibes here so remember that before you budget for using this garbage at your company.

Re:I see what they did here

[liquidpele]

Autocad is free for students too, all the software companies learned that lesson 20 years ago. The real reason is that companies will straight up directly pay the colleges to use their product in the classes. Microsoft did this with .NET to everyone they could back in the day as well.

Re: I see what they did here

[sixminuteabs]

You remember incorrectly. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is $30 and does not require E5.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

Copilot is actually worth that money, Bard / Gemini not so much.

I am a Gemini

[holostagram]

Haha, great name. Gemini's are magic and tragic. I am sure this will also be both.

Enshittification of AI Has Begun

[classiclantern]

When Apple or Google or Amazon or Microsoft introduce AI tools, it seems helpful at first. Companies don't provide useful tools for no reason. Private AI tools will be useful for maybe for a couple of years, people will incorporate AI onto their work flow, but then enshittification will set in. Each company will modify the LLM until it is ML that steers the "customer" to the answer that makes the company the most profit.

AI can be so obviously wrong

[DrXym]

"name a 7 letter word that starts with p and ends with s and could involve machinery", "duh okay here are some 7 letter words that could involve machinery - presses, pistons, propellers, pulleys, pumps, processes". Erm okay ... some of those words have 7 letters I guess.

Re:

[DrXym]

"it must be 7 letters", "duh I apologize since processes has 8 letters, here are some 7 letter words pliers, pinions, presses, pumps, pistons, pilots". Imagine this shit deciding if you qualify for health insurance.

Re:

[4wdloop]

Prompt engineering?

what is gemini?
I'm Gemini, the best way to directly access Google AI. I'm trained on large amounts of publicly available data and I can communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of questions. Let me know if you'd like to learn more, or just try me out and see what I can do for you.

historically, what is Gemini?
I'm Gemini, the best way to directly access Google AI. I'm trained on large amounts of publicly available data and I can communicate and generate human-lik

Re: AI can be so obviously wrong

[LindleyF]

That's because LLMs are not answer services. They are not logic engines. They seem enough like those things to set incorrect expectations, but they are not those things. They cannot be expected to provide information. What they do is transform and generate text. The meaning behind the text is a harder problem that hasn't been fully cracked yet.

Re:

[timeOday]

That example doesn't trip up Chat GPT 4 at all.

it's $20

[4wdloop]

I kept being annoyed, no, offended by such fractional pricing trying to play on psychological effects. It's $20, and we know it so stop it!

Re:

[andrewbaldwin]

Totally agree with you.

Apparently (and this may be an urban myth) the pricing at a fraction near to (but not quite) 1 was done to ensure that shop assistants had to register a sale in order to give change - it stopped them taking the money from the customer and then pretending to process the purchase, but instead pocketing the money.

Early cash registers would only open the cash drawer when a sale was made.

Then the psychological effect was noticed and (ab)used to dupe people into thinking things were less ex

Re:

[4wdloop]

That is very interesting! Thanks!
Maybe I should follow "do not assign malice where stupidity could be used to explain", eh?

And duh in US we still need to add sales tax to it so it's really 19.99 * 1.0925 = $21.839075 here where I live.

Can I use this to upgrade my google home devices

[Hadlock]

I'd love for my google home devices to just tell me the answer to XYZ question without giving me a link to some terrible SEO result. The number of times I get "I don't know, but here's a search result that might help." bitch if I wanted to google it on my computer I'd just go do that. I'm not getting off my couch to go research what the population of salt lake city was last year, or what voltage high speed rail trains use in europe.

Perfect!

[MachineShedFred]

"Gee, we could work on fixing it, or we can just rename it and make a big press splash."

"Oh, definitely the rename. That's easy. Fixing shit is hard."

$20

[awwshit]

For just $20/month you too can support a drunken busker.

Reverse Subscription

[Zigakly]

Can I pay $20/mo for it to stop monitoring me from other people's phones? They know it's me...