'The party for developers looking for freebies from AI is over' - Google will end free access to the Gemini API within months amid rumors that it may charge for AI search queries

There have long been rumors that Google is considering charging users for results generated by artificial intelligence, especially with the idea of a premium search engine that uses generative artificial intelligence.

Whether this will happen remains to be seen, but Google is ending the era of free access to its Gemini API, signaling a new financial strategy within AI development.

In the past, developers used free access to attract them to Google AI products and steer them away from OpenAI, but that's about to change. OpenAI was first to market and has already monetized its APIs and LLM access. Now Google plans to do it again with its cloud services and AI Studio, and it looks like the days of unlimited free access are numbered.

RIP PaLM API

In an email to developers, Google announced that on August 15, it is shutting down access to the PaLM API (a pre-Gemini model used to create custom chatbots) for developers via AI Studio. This API was discontinued back in February.

The tech giant hopes to turn free users into paying customers by promoting the stable version of Gemini 1.0 Pro. "We recommend testing hints, customization, inference and other features with the stable Gemini 1.0 Pro to avoid interruptions," the letter reads. "You can use the same API key you used for the PaLM API to access Gemini models through the Google AI SDK."

The paid plan starts at $7 for one million input tokens and goes up to $21 for the same number of output tokens.

There is one exception to Google's plans - PaLM and Gemini will remain available to customers paying for Vertex AI on Google Cloud. However, as HPCWire notes, "regular developers with cheaper budgets typically use AI Studio because they can't afford Vertex."