There is, as the old saying goes, no such thing as a free lunch. Yet as long as the meal arrives at the table without a bill, most people will happily tuck in. The trouble begins when the freebie becomes a habit... one that eventually requires someone, somewhere, to foot the bill.
At the moment, many of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies are doling out generous, no-cost subscriptions. OpenAI is doing so with ChatGPT, as are Google with Gemini and Perplexity with its eponymous AI tool. ChatGPT Go, first introduced with a ₹399 price tag, has been made free in recent weeks. Google is offering its Gemini Pro plan at no charge for 18 months to all Jio Unlimited 5G users, bundling access to Gemini 3, 2TB of storage, the Vero 3.1 AI video tool, NotebookLM and the Nano Banana image-editing suite. Airtel customers, meanwhile, receive a complimentary Perplexity Pro subscription.
Much of this largesse is aimed at giving India an early, irresistible taste of advanced AI models. OpenAI hopes to expand well beyond the 800 million users who rely on ChatGPT each week globally. India, with its fast-growing digital population, may be the market that delivers the next great leap, especially as China operates largely behind its own technological walls, with domestic models serving hundreds of millions.
India’s Internet landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past decade. The country’s total Internet subscribers grew from 251.59 million in March 2014 to 954.40 million in March 2024, including 398.35 million rural users. As of April 2024, 612,952 of India’s 644,131 villages — or 95.15 per cent — have 3G/4G mobile connectivity, according to data from the Registrar General of India.
During a visit to India earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman underscored the country’s importance in a meeting with journalists. “India is an incredibly important market for AI in general, and for OpenAI in particular. It’s our second-biggest market; we tripled users here in the last year,” he said. “India should be one of the leaders of the AI revolution. It’s astonishing to see how the country has embraced the technology and how people are building across the entire stack.”
Our relationship with the Internet has changed profoundly since smartphones entered our lives less than two decades ago. Gmail arrived free — it still is, although millions now pay for additional cloud storage as 15GB no longer suffices — and so did a vast array of early digital tools and platforms.
The Internet has its own geography and customs, and they are remarkably easy to settle into. AI chatbots make the entry point even smoother. They behave like creatures designed to fulfil requests according to their own internal logic. Even a poorly phrased prompt produces something — from a few lines on “why Macbeth believes he must kill King Duncan” to fake videos.
Free today, digital inequality tomorrow
Though chatbots are envisioned as engines for drug discovery and for parsing vast troves of seismic data, most of our daily usage seems largely focused on generating memes and helping students evade homework.
The immense energy consumption of servers and data centres is taking a mounting toll on the planet, even as the cost of running AI models slowly declines.
“We’ve made remarkable progress with distillation and with small, reasoning-focused models,” Altman noted earlier in the year. “It’s not cheap — training them is expensive — but it’s doable, and there will be an explosion of great creativity.... To stay at the frontier, costs will continue to rise on an exponential curve, but returns on intelligence will also grow exponentially in economic and scientific value.... At the same time, the cost of a given unit of intelligence (one year later) seems to fall by around 10x each year. What’s happening with the reduction in cost is extraordinary.”
In a recent interview, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said AI would not “replace the friends you have,” but would “probably be additive in some way for a lot of people’s lives”. By this time next year, when many of us may be fully dependent on chatbots, the era of free plans could well be over. The question is: how willing will we be to pay ₹1,000 or ₹2,000 a month for a chatbot to act as our companion or confidant? It would be a charge layered atop the already heavy burden of streaming subscriptions we keep renewing without a second thought.
With India having one of the highest smartphone and Internet penetration rates in the world, there is enough opportunity for AI companies. A Boston Consulting Group report said in June: “With over 700 million Internet users and widespread smartphone penetration, India generates massive volumes of data, which is the fuel for training AI models. This scale, combined with open architecture, is enabling the development of population-scale AI solutions across sectors.”
Free AI today could deepen digital inequality tomorrow. If premium features become expensive, AI may create a two-tier society — those who can afford intelligence-on-demand and those dependent on slower, restricted free tools. Further, free usage enables companies to go through massive behavioural datasets. This knowledge — how people converse, query, learn — will fuel the next generation of AI models.
Choose your AI bot
ChatGPT Go: Free for all users for one year
Google Gemini Pro: No charge for 18 months to all Jio Unlimited 5G users, bundling access to Gemini 3, 2TB of storage, the Vero 3.1 AI video tool, NotebookLM and the Nano Banana image-editing suite.
Perplexity Pro: Free for one year for Airtel customers