There have been rumors for a while that Google is considering charging users for AI-powered results, particularly around the idea of premium search options powered by generative AI.
It remains to be seen if that will happen, but Google teeth It marks the end of the era of free access to the Gemini API and signals a new financial strategy for AI development.
Developers have traditionally enjoyed free access to steer them away from OpenAI’s products and towards Google’s AI products, but that is changing. OpenAI is first to market and has already monetized its API and his LLM access. Now, Google plans to emulate this through its cloud and AI Studio service, and the day of free access appears to be on the horizon.
RIPPaLM API
In an email to developers, Google said it will shut down access to the PaLM API (a pre-Gemini model used to build custom chatbots) for developers via AI Studio on August 15th. Stated. This API was deprecated in February.
The tech giant hopes to convert free users into paying customers by promoting its stable Gemini 1.0 Pro. “We recommend testing prompts, tuning, inference, and other features on the stable Gemini 1.0 Pro to avoid interruptions,” the email says. “You can access Gemini models through the Google AI SDK using the same API key you used for the PaLM API.”
Prices for paid plans start at $7 for 1 million input tokens and go up to $21 for the same number of output tokens.
There is one exception to Google’s plan. PaLM and Gemini will continue to be accessible to customers who pay for Vertex AI on Google Cloud. however, HPC wire He points out that “regular developers on a low budget usually use AI Studio because they can’t afford Vertex.”
