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It has not been the first, but the most forceful. Openai took the first step in autumn, asking 200 monthly dollars per chatgpt pro. Google has responded by raising the bet: $ 250 for its ultra plan. A subscription that not only monetizes capabilities. Also marks hierarchies. Do you want the most capable? Pag.
And it is not a way of speaking. At that price, it is not accessed only to a smarter chatbot, but to the hard core of the near future:
- Deep Think, The new mode of reasoning of Gemini 2.5 Pro.
- Preferential access to video and audio generation tools (I see 3, Image 4).
- Project Mariner: Agents who understand, plan, act, execute.
- Flow, the cinematographic creation tool with camera control and video generation in 1080p.
- Whisk animate, a tool to turn images into animated videos of 8 seconds.
- Notebook LLM with higher limits and advanced versions of the model.
- Gemini in Chrome, with context of the page, with early access.
- Gemini integrated into Gmail, Docs, Chrome and Search, with persistent context and priority use.
- 30 TB of storage in Drive, Photos and Gmail.
- And a premium YouTube subscription.
Gemini is no longer just conversation. It is the interface of the world.
Image: Google.
And the most important thing is not what Ultra includes. Is what leaves out. Google has taken everything that defines this new stage of AI – agency, autonomy, deep reasoning, extended multimodality – and has encapsulated after a payment wall. In that gesture there is not only business model. There is vision. Intelligence becomes a product, but also on border.
By the way, there is a 50% discount for the first three months. And the previous plan is now called ‘Google Ai Pro’.
On the other side it remains Flash. The free version – or low cost – designed for most. Fast, competent, useful. Like a car without a steering wheel. An AI without memory, without tools, without hands. It serves to respond, not to act. Do not create flows, it does not automate anything, it does not think beyond a few seconds. Flash is the promise of democratization that is still maintained. Ultra, the true pilot.
The Google movement does not surprise, but confirms. The mass access phase is over, open experimentation. What is now built is an economy of computational performance. Whoever wants more context, more persistence, more power, will have to pay it. And soon. Because if 2022 was the year of glare, and 2024 that of the co -pilots, 2025 will be that of digital classes.
And this time, the border will not be technical. It will be economical.
What Google is not just a commercial movement. It is structural. Institutionalizes restricted access. If for years the knowledge tended to open —wikipedia, Google, YouTube, Moocs– Now it begins to fold in high -end products.
With this, productivity, creativity and the ability to compete are also replicated. The digital elevator continues to go up, but is getting more and more to get on it.
Because it is not paid only for technology. It is paid for an advantage that is not seen, but that decides: the right to think with more help, in more directions, with less friction. The right to automate before others. To have an assistant who does know how to program, who does understand video, which does remember, that does act. As always, intelligence – human or artificial – tends to concentrate where capital accumulates.
And the rest? The average user is on the other shore. With a AI that responds, but does not decide. Who attends, but does not anticipate. That summarizes, but does not build. That is the new gap: not between those who use AI and those who do not, but between those who have it in their favor, and those who only see it from behind a crystal.
Google has made official what Openai has already hinted: access to automated knowledge will be priced, threshold and owner.
And if the future is made of intelligent interfaces, reasoning engines and agents who execute for us, then: the future costs $ 250 per month.
Outstanding image | Solen Feyissa in Unspash
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