While it competes with Microsoft for subscriptions, Google has renamed its Bard chatbot Gemini after the new artificial intelligence that powers it, called Gemini, and said consumers can pay to upgrade its reasoning capabilities to gain subscribers. Gemini Advanced offers a more powerful Ultra 1.0 AI model that customers can subscribe to for US$19.99 ($30.81) a month, according to Alphabet, which said it is offering Gemini Advanced for US$19.99 ($30.81) a month. 

The subscription fee for Gemini storage is $9.90 ($15.40) a month, but users will receive two terabytes of cloud storage by signing up today. They will also have access to Gemini through Gmail and the Google productivity suite shortly. 

It is believed that Google One AI Premium, as well as its partner OpenAI, are the biggest competitors yet for the company. It also shows that consumers are becoming increasingly competitive as they now have several paid AI subscriptions to choose from. 

In the past year, OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus subscription launched an early access program that allowed users to purchase early access to AI models and other features, while Microsoft recently launched a competing subscription for artificial intelligence in Word and Excel applications. The subscription for both services costs US$20 a month in the United States.

According to Google, human annotators are routinely monitoring and modifying conversations that are read, tagged, and processed by Gemini - even though these conversations are not owned by Google Accounts. As far as data security is concerned, Google has not stated whether these annotators are in-house or outsourced. (Google does not specify whether they are in-house or outsourced.)

These conversations will be kept for as long as three years, along with "related data" such as the languages and devices used by the user and their location, etc. It is now possible for users to control how they wish to retain the Gemini-relevant data they use. 

Using the Gemini Apps Activity dashboard in Google’s My Activity dashboard (which is enabled by default), users can prevent future conversations with Gemini from being saved to a Google Account for review, meaning they will no longer be able to use the three-year window for future discussions with Gemini). 

The Gemini Apps Activity screen lets users delete individual prompts and conversations with Gemini, however. However, Google says that even when Gemini Apps Activity is turned off, Gemini conversations will be kept on the user's Google Account for up to 72 hours to maintain the safety and security of Gemini apps and to help improve Gemini apps. 

In user conversations, Google encourages users not to enter confidential or sensitive information which they might not wish to be viewed by reviewers or used by Google to improve their products, services, and machine learning technologies. At the beginning of Thursday, Krawczyk said that Gemini Advanced was available in English in 150 countries worldwide. 

Next week, Gemini will begin launching smartphones in Asia-Pacific, Latin America and other regions around the world, including Japanese and Korean, as well as additional language support for the product. This will follow the company's smartphone rollout in the US.

The free trial subscription period lasts for two months and it is available to all users. Upon hearing this announcement, Krawczyk said the Google artificial intelligence approach had matured, bringing "the artist formerly known as Bard" into the "Gemini era." As GenAI tools proliferate, organizations are becoming increasingly wary of privacy risks associated with such tools. 

As a result of a Cisco survey conducted last year, 63% of companies have created restrictions on what kinds of data might be submitted to GenAI tools, while 27% have prohibited GenAI tools from being used at all. A recent survey conducted by GenAI revealed that 45% of employees submitted "problematic" data into the tool, including personal information and non-public files about their employers, in an attempt to assist. 

Several companies, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others, are offering GenAI solutions that are intended for enterprises that no longer retain data for any primary purpose, whether for training models or any other purpose at all. There is no doubt that consumers are going to get shorted - as is usually the case - when it comes to corporate greed.