Generative artificial intelligence was supposed to help us. Instead, it is turning out to be expensive. Google has just announced a new $249.99 per month AI Ultra plan for those who want unlimited access to the company’s most advanced AI features. The eye-watering price makes it $50 more expensive than ChatGPT Pro.
The plan offers the highest usage limits across Google’s AI apps, including Gemini, NotebookLM, Whisk, and its new AI video generation tool Flow.
“It’s for the trailblazers, the pioneers, those of you who want cutting-edge AI from Google,” said Josh Woodward, head of product incubator Google Labs and the Gemini app. “You can think of this Ultra plan as your VIP pass for Google AI.”
The new plan comes with 30 terabytes of storage. At the moment, Google charges for a few premium versions of cloud services and AI products under a tier called Google One AI Premium.
Alphabet’s revenue growth from advertising continues to be high but it has decelerated a bit in recent years. Further, there is tremendous pressure from asset-light OpenAI.
The Sam Altman-led company last December launched ChatGPT Pro, a $200 monthly plan that allows “scaled access” to OpenAI’s best models and tools.
In the new tier, you don’t have to worry about Gmail and Docs or YouTube. It is access to models like Veo 3, and unlimited usage of features like Flow (the new AI film-making app) and the compute-intensive Deep Research that matters. Soon, Google will offer Deep Think to AI Ultra users, which is the new enhanced reasoning mode that is part of its Gemini 2.5 Pro model. There will also be Project Mariner, Google’s web-surfing agent.
It’s a tough sell, even though Google previewed what could be an important advancement in generative AI for the future. Its large language model (LLM) Diffusion works a bit differently for image generation, but Google is now experimenting with Gemini Diffusion.
It generates entire blocks of tokens at the same time, allowing the model to work faster and it can check its work as it goes to make the final output more accurate than comparable LLMs. Google says Gemini Diffusion is 2.5 times faster than Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite.
