Among the viral topics on social media yesterday is that the Galaxy AI artificial intelligence feature on the Galaxy S24 series will only be free until the end of 2025. Many are wondering why it was not announced during the Unpacked event but hidden at the bottom of Samsung's website.
We asked this question to Samsung and the answer given by YJ Kim, Head of the AI Team at Samsung's mobile device business, was because of cost. He said AI technology at this time is still new with limited capabilities. In the future Samsung may want to offer more new features that require the implementation of more recent models as well as collaboration with third parties such as Google.
The cost of training new AI models and maintaining browsers to access AI in the cloud is high. Because of this, the Galaxy AI feature is only free until the end of 2025. However, Samsung still has no idea how much it will cost since AI technology is developing rapidly.
The built-in AI model that Call Assist, Live Translate and Magic Compose (in Google Messages) use on the device probably won't cost you much. But text rewriting services and generating summaries of long notes/documents in Samsung Notes and Voice Recorder accessing Google's artificial intelligence in the cloud for example may be charged by Google after 2025.
The fact is that access to more powerful models such as GPT-4 Turbo, Copilot Pro and Gemini Ultra is already subject to a monthly subscription by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. The purchasing power is in the hands of the user to subscribe to AI features that they feel are worth it or not after the free trial period ends.