There will be a Google Bard Advanced, but it probably won’t be free.

Google Bard Advanced is on the way, and it could be the company’s first effort at charging for an artificial intelligence chatbot. Bard’s website offers a code that may be used to receive three months of Bard Advanced for free.

It is implied that after that, there will be a fee. The code was uncovered and released by Bedros Pamboukian, an X (previously Twitter) user. It also has a broken Google One link. This might imply that to use Bard Advanced, users will need to purchase a Google One membership.

In December 2023, Google initially revealed Bard Advanced together with the new AI hypercomputer from Google Cloud and the huge language model Gemini. With the capacity to “seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai described Gemini as the company’s most powerful model to date in a blog post. Bard uses the larger of the three sizes available for Gemini: Gemini Ultra, Gemini Nano, and Gemini Pro. Although Gemini Ultra isn’t currently accessible to the general public, Google has said that it will power Bard Advanced.

Regarding Bard Advanced’s availability, the previously cited code implies that it could be connected to Google One (though it’s unclear what membership tier would be necessary), but as of this writing, no information has been verified. At the moment, Google is using a small group to evaluate its capabilities (which may also be the reason the code is available). Although Google stated in December that Bard Advanced will be ready “early next year,” there is no set date for release as of yet. However, it might happen at any time.